[ONLINE] Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Martha Thomae Elias, PhD Candidate in Music Technology

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Doctoral Colloquium: Martha Thomae Elias, PhD Candidate, Music Technology

Join URL: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82439650053

Guatemalan Cathedral Choirbooks: From Manuscripts to Digital Images to Symbolic Editorial Scores

Abstract: Guatemala City’s Cathedral choirbook collection (GuatC) consists of six manuscripts copied in Guatemala during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collection includes mostly sixteenth-century polyphonic music by Spanish composers, some of whom were active in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. There are also pieces by local composers and by other European composers such as Lassus and Palestrina. While partial inventories and a general overview of the repertoire exist, access to the contents of these sources is difficult. Poor digital images made from microfilm include only books 1–3, with some folios cropped or missing. Guatemalan musicologists Dieter Lehnhoff and Omar Morales Abril have begun to preserve and disseminate these colonial sources by transcribing them into modern notation and performing their music, but these efforts cover only a small fraction of the music in the choirbooks. It is my goal to increase access to the music of this collection. To achieve this, I use digitization and music-encoding technologies, including optical music recognition, automatic voice-alignment, and editorial correction software. On my dissertation, I am focusing on the book of masses GuatC 1, describing the step-by-step methodology and technologies used. This encoding process increases access to the sources by producing high-quality images and machine-readable files that encode the pieces of the choirbook. These files can later be read by a machine for playback and automatic transcription into modern notation. They can also be used to automatically compare concordant sources of encoded music, providing lists of variants, enabling future scholars to evaluate the transmission of music from Europe to Latin America.

Bio: Martha E. Thomae is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. She has a BSc in Mathematics from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and a MA in Music Technology from McGill. Her research focuses on the preservation and encoding of mensural music. She is a member of the Distributed Digital Music Archives & Libraries Lab led by Ichiro Fujinaga (2015–present) and board member of the Music Encoding Initiative (2020–22). Since 2020, she has been acting as co-chair of the Mensural MEI Interest Group. Her dissertation is on the digitization and encoding of Guatemalan choirbooks from the colonial period using optical music recognition, automatic voice alignment, and computational error detection.