MMDB

SCRIBE is a program for the encoding, storing, analysis and printing of medieval music. Its encoding language is based on the common names of neumes and ligatures; it has an integrated database into which all encoded music may be stored and searched, and from which data may be exported for further analysis using other database programs and for interfacing with other notation programs such as SCORE.

A complete annual cycle of Gregorian chant was encoded using SCRIBE, as well as a substantial number of 14th century secular works. This material may now be searched using the MMDB Search.

The SCRIBE database now contains some 6,000 musical scores from the middle ages and the early Renaissance period. These scores are available to authorised users in the following formats:

• Original notation: exactly as the scribe wrote the source manuscript
• Original notation with modern clefs on a five-line staff
• Modern notation, with round stemless noteheads and slurs indicating the original ligation and the original notation immediately above the modern
• Modern notation with rhythmic values as indicated in mensural notation

Bibliographic data from the Fourteenth-century Music Project can be integrated with the SCRIBE scores. Any of the 6,000 scores can be accessed by keyword (i.e. any word in the text), melodic motif, liturgical function, composer, genre, manuscript and folio.

SCRIBE

SCRIBE is a professional research tool for use with music written in any form of square notation, from medieval plainsong through the most complex ars subtilior to mensural notation of the sixteenth century. It enables you to encode any musically significant element of notation, to search the data you have entered for any of those elements, and to retrieve, print or export the results of your search. SCRIBE has been designed specifically for scholarly research on music written in square notation: it is not an adaptation of a program conceived for modern notation. While its output by plotter or laser printer is of publishable quality, SCRIBE is not just a program for printing music: its most important features are its ability to deal with complex ligatures, its precision of music and text alignment, its integrated database and its ability to export data for further processing in other programs.

SCRIBE's Integrated Database

Within SCRIBE, data can be interrogated for any of the elements of notation (pitches, neumes, motifs and melodic fragments, mensuration signs, clefs, accidentals, staff lines, coloured notes, etc.), any text set to music, any descriptive information (composer, manuscript source, genre, etc) or any comments with which you have annotated the data. It enables you to analyse the encoded music by providing comprehensive statistical information about pitch, notes, text and their relationship, and enables searches for melodic patterns, syllables, words and larger fragments of text and sequences of notes. If the data is plainsong, you can search for any feast, hour or item in all or selected manuscripts; in polyphony, texts, melodies and note-shapes can be searched by composer, genre, voice and manuscript.

Encoding in SCRIBE

SCRIBE assumes that the user has a basic familiarity with square notation. The mnemonic codes used for entering the music are mostly abbreviations of the customary names of neumes combined with numbers which identify the position of neumes on the staff. This makes data entry relatively simple for those already familiar with square notation; and for those less familiar with it, the mnemonic codes are available on the screen at the same time as the music is being entered. Immediate graphic confirmation of the encoded notation and text is given, and the score is progressively built up on the screen so that visual checking is possible during input. The program checks for syntactical accuracy, and will not permit invalid codes to be entered. Ease of entry and accuracy of stored data have been high priorities in the design of the program. Text is entered along with the music, and great precision in relating the text to the music is possible.

SCRIBE enables you to see the music encoded in its original form in square notation, or in modern round notation without translating the data, but simply by changing the display. It is not a program for automated transcription of mensural notation into its modern equivalent, but it will show encoded music in stemless, round noteheads with slurs indicating ligation. Black, red, void and red void notation are supported.

Few of SCRIBE's research functions have been automated: the design of the research is left to the user, and the interpretation of the results is left as open as possible. Some internal interpretations are essential to SCRIBE's functions: for example, the pitch of each note is calculated by relating its position on the staff to the clef entered. It can compute the first, the last, the highest and the lowest pitches and hence the range and the final of the piece. But the interpretation of this information - for example, the attribution of the piece to a mode - is left to the user. In this way SCRIBE has been designed as a tool of maximum flexibility.

Using SCRIBE with Other Database Programs

SCRIBE's export feature makes it possible to use external database programs (dBASE, FoxPro or any other database which can import data in either fixed-length or delimited format) for further research and analysis. This feature has been used for the statistical analysis on modal behaviour, the comparison of melodic variants, the compilation of dictionaries of melodic fragments related to individual words and syllables and the definition of style in different melodic repertoires. Exported data can also be translated into other music printing programs such as SCORE, with either square notation or modern notation.

Technical Requirements

SCRIBE was developed in the DOS environment, but will run within Windows. It will use extended memory when available. The current version needs some 360K of RAM. Data storage is efficient: a database of 5,400 items needs 6 MB of hard disk space.

The SCRIBE Database

The SCRIBE database consists of a complete transcription of the annual cycle of Gregorian chant in the Dominican rite from early fourteenth-century sources. It comprises some 5,388 complete melodies, and is the only computerised database to contain a complete cycle in which the text, pitch and neumes of the original are available for scrutiny.

Two features of the Dominican chants need to be highlighted: they have undergone two reform processes (the Cistercian reform of the 1170s and the Dominicans' own, 1244–1256); and they were bound by strict rules for copying liturgical books. The 'reforms' mean that their melodies sometimes were deliberately altered from those found in the ancient sources; the rules meant that text, pitches and neumes were required to be transmitted faithfully from the exemplars to each copy. Thus the Dominican melodies show a remarkable consistency from one source to another, while their differences from other sources sometimes reflect thirteenth-century musical taste and normative views of modal characteristics.

With the assistance of published indices by Bryden & Hughes, Steiner and Hesbert, the SCRIBE database has related the Dominican chants to a wide network of universally available catalogues, original manuscripts and modern published editions. In addition, the office chants have been carefully collated with the contents of the Poissy Antiphonal, an early fourteenth-century Dominican source now in the State Library of Victoria.

The transcriptions into modern notation have been produced from data originally encoded in SCRIBE and then translated into the standard notation program SCORE. From this were produced the EPS files of each item, which were then rasterised into JPG files for web accessibility or converted to PDF format for cross-platform access. Through the collaboration of the State Library of Victoria, colour images of the Poissy Antiphonal have been incorporated into the database.

The result is that in response to a search for any word in the liturgical text, any fragment of melody or any element of the liturgical description of the work, the database will return the complete text, the complete liturgical description of the work in both Latin and English, a transcription into modern notation in which the original notation is preserved, a colour image of the folio of the Poissy Antiphonal on which it is found, brief references to modern editions, the earliest located source of both text and melody and concordances with published and indexed manuscripts.