Who runs Measuring Polyphony and what is its current status?

Measuring Polyphony is directed by Karen Desmond. The project began when Desmond was at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, and it now continues at Brandeis University. Its current status is active: the site hosts digital encodings of late medieval music, and it maintains pages for project description, team, advisory board, acknowledgments, editorial decisions, known issues, and future plans — including a July 2019 news item.

What the project is

Measuring Polyphony presents digital encodings of late medieval polyphonic music — music composed for two or more parts — copied in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. The encodings are in mensural notation, the notation used for almost all polyphonic music from 1300–1600, whose rules changed little from around 1350.

Where possible, the encodings are linked directly to high-resolution images of the original manuscript sources and to MIDI audio files. This keeps the music in its original notational context rather than translating it into modern notation and sorting it by composer, genre, or country, as printed editions typically do.

The project's three goals

1. Make transcriptions and audio freely available online to performers, scholars, and the general public, presented alongside images of the original manuscripts.
2. Encode the medieval notation in a standardised machine-readable format so the music data can potentially be searched or analysed.
3. Leverage existing digital resources and community standards — specifically the rich digital image repositories of music manuscripts and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) standard for encoding music notation.

How the site is organised

The site is built around a small set of sections:

What this means if you want to use it

• If you are a performer or general reader, the transcriptions and MIDI audio are presented alongside manuscript images, so you can compare the original notation with a readable version.
• If you are a researcher or developer, the MEI-based encodings and the Downloads/Github sections are the relevant entry points for searching, analysing, or reusing the data.
• If you need to know how a specific editorial choice was made, the Editorial Decisions page documents those decisions, and Known Issues lists current limitations.

The project description notes that the site "offers new possibilities for mediating the scholarly and public experience of this richly evocative music within its original context" — that framing, together with the three goals above, is the clearest statement of what the project is currently set up to do.