Blogs

News Update

First of all, the whole lab congratulates Dr. John Ashley Burgoyne, who has now officially received his Ph.D. title. Ashley is getting ready to move to the Netherlands in June to start a Post-Doctoral position at the University of Amsterdam to study what makes tunes stick in our ears. We also congratulate Remi Chiu, the senior musicologist on the SIMSSA project, who will head into his thesis defence next week having just accepted a position for next academic year at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland. Bravo to both and all the best with future endeavours.

Putting Drupal to good use

The ELVIS project is in full swing, after a very short ramp up. Our team of Research Assistants has been collecting public domain music notation files and uploading them into what will be a vast database of music spanning from 1300-1900. McGill will focus on collecting early music, that is, up until 1700 or so, while researchers at other Universities will focus on later repertoire.

ELVIS and RA3 host a mini-conference

As spring has coyly come and harshly vanished again, the ELVIS project has started to show its first shoots. Right before the start of Reading Week, around 40 students and researchers assembled for a mini-conference hosted by CIRMMT's Research Axis 3 (RA3).

Neon

Nine Million Sources

In my last post I mentioned that I estimated that there were around nine million different sources of printed music in the world. How did I come up with that number?

Spinning Wheels

So far, the SIMSSA project has focused on developing OMR search systems and testing them on relatively small documents. Even the very large Liber Usualis, with its 2340 pages, however, is very small when compared to an entire collection of digitized music scores. IMSLP has 157,490 scores and counting, and many libraries from around the world are joining the trend of digitizing their collections.

Who's in the Ivory Tower Now?

It's been very interesting this past week to compare and contrast all the excitement about SOPA/PIPA with the world of Academia.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

It's been a lot of fun coming to grips with OMR and discovering for myself how brilliant ideas get put together to develop a cutting edge piece of technology. There's no denying it though, every so often we hear:

"That's all very clever. What's it for?"

Streamlining Gamera

The Salzinnes project has gone public! I'm writing from Austria now, here to play in some concerts, yet I got the news right away in the form of a Facebook notification. But of course.

Social Coding

Last week the Salzinnes project made its first public appearance in a series of presentations at the AMS Conference in San Francisco. The responses have been encouraging, ranging from appreciation of the diva interface as a tool for working with manuscripts to offers to help us get connected with other libraries and collections to provide us with other sources that we might incorporate into the project.

SIMSSA

Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis