What is Measuring Polyphony?

Measuring Polyphony is a digital project that publishes encodings of late medieval polyphonic music in mensural notation, linked where possible to high-resolution manuscript images and MIDI audio files. It is aimed at performers, scholars, and the general public who want to encounter this repertoire in a form closer to its original notation rather than in modern print editions. The site is free to browse; the project description does not mention any pricing, account requirement, or login restriction.

What the project covers

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a major increase in manuscripts transmitting music across a wider range of styles, genres, and subjects, copied both in music-only anthologies and in miscellaneous collections that interweave song, text, and illuminations. During the same period, techniques for notating rhythmic duration emerged — a notation called “mensural” or “measurable.” Almost all polyphonic music (music for two or more parts) from 1300–1600 is notated in mensural notation, whose rules changed little from around 1350.

Measuring Polyphony presents digitisations of polyphonic compositions copied in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts in mensural notation. Where possible, these are linked directly to high-resolution images of the original manuscript sources and to MIDI audio files.

Why it exists

Modern print editions distance today’s readers from the original experience of this music in two ways:

• They translate the original notation into modern notation.
• They sort and classify the repertoire according to print conventions — volumes or series ordered by composer, genre, or country.

Measuring Polyphony instead offers new possibilities for mediating scholarly and public experience of this music within its original context.

How it is built

The project leverages rich digital image repositories of music manuscripts and the community-based standards for encoding music notation of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Its stated goals are to:

• Make transcriptions and audio freely available online to performers, scholars, and the general public, presented alongside images of the original music manuscripts.
• Encode the medieval notation in a standardised machine-readable format so the music data can potentially be searched or analysed.

Who runs it

The project began when the project director, Karen Desmond, was at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, and it now continues at Brandeis University.

What you can do on the site

The site’s navigation points to several areas: Browse, Transcribe, and About. The About section includes the project description, project team, advisory board, acknowledgments, the repertoire, the encoding process, website design, a GitHub presence, downloads, editorial decisions, known issues, future plans (including a July 2019 news item), and feedback. If you want to work with the data directly, the GitHub and Downloads entries are the places to start; if you want to explore the repertoire, Browse is the entry point.