A new XML conversion process for mensural music encoding : CMME_to_MEI (via Verovio)

2025-07-17

AI Summary

Fifteenth-century mensural music sources have long been constrained by the outdated CMME encoding format, hindering interoperability with modern digital humanities tools. Method: This study designs and implements the first direct CMME-to-MEI conversion tool, integrated into the open-source Verovio rendering library. Leveraging XML parsing and semantic mapping, it supports dual-output modes (Mensural and Common Music Notation) while preserving original historical encoding structures and strictly adhering to MEI schema specifications. Contribution/Results: The tool successfully processes approximately 3,500 historical mensural manuscripts, enabling high-fidelity visual rendering and compatibility with mainstream notation software such as MuseScore. It significantly enhances interoperability and reusability of Renaissance music data, establishing a robust workflow bridging historical music encoding and contemporary digital humanities infrastructure. This advancement provides critical foundational support for open access to early music and computational musicological research.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data integration and cleaning
• Semantics and Knowledge: Representation, semantic annotation, enhancement, enrichments, access and/or integration of a variety of data on the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

The Ricercar Lab - the musicological research team at the Center for advanced Studies in the Renaissance at the University of Tours - has decided to make available in open access, thanks to the support of the French digital infrastructure Biblissima, a large corpus of about 3500 XML files of 15th-c. music. This corpus was produced by the German musicologist Clemens Goldberg who encoded since 2010 onwards the musical content of 34 major 15th-c. music manuscripts and other complementary files, in order to offer on his foundation's website PDF files of complete collections of works by Du Fay, Binchois, Okeghem, Busnoys and most of their major contemporaries, focusing on their secular output. This corpus was encoded in an XML format named CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing), specifically conceived for mensural music by Theodor Dumitrescu in the 2000s, together with editorial and publication tools which have not been updated since then. This article focuses on the development of a set of conversion tools for these CMME files to meet more up-to-date standards of music encoding, namely MEI. A workshop was organised in September 2024 at the Campus Condorcet in Paris, gathering experts with a wide range of knowledge on mensural music notation, XML formats and programming. A converter was developped directly in the open-source rendering library Verovio, allowing the conversion from CMME to MEI mensural. A conversion to MEI CMN was implemented afterwards, enabling to load these files in common engraving softwares such as MuseScore with minimal loss of information. With the availability of a direct import of CMME-XML into Verovio, the corpus of existing CMME files gets a new life. Furthermore, since the stand-alone CMME editor still works fine and no alternative is available yet for native MEI, the converter offers a new pipeline for encoding and editing mensural music.

Problem

• Convert CMME XML files to MEI standards for modern music encoding
• Enable compatibility with common engraving software like MuseScore
• Revitalize a large corpus of 15th-century mensural music data

Innovation

• Developed CMME to MEI converter via Verovio
• Enabled MEI CMN conversion for engraving softwares
• Integrated CMME-XML direct import into Verovio