Scores are used throughout TROMPA, and are an indispensable means of communicating and
preserving the musical content of classical music works. Music notation evolved since about the
tenth century and is universally understood by professional musicians, i.e. those most likely to
generate the performances discussed and appreciated by their audiences. At the same time, it is not
necessary to understand music notation to appreciate and enjoy classical music, so TROMPA does
not expect its community of music-enthusiasts to read it, although many members of this
community will be able to do so.
Digital scores, either rendered from MEI encodings via the TROMPA Data Infrastructure, or from
PDF or other graphic files representing physical library documents (such as the historic printed
scores available via IMSLP, or the early music prints in EMO), will find extensive use throughout WPs
3, 4, 5 & 6.
The Digital Score Edition component of TROMPA is to a large extent based on the Music Encoding
and Linked Data (MELD) [1] technology developed in prior projects FAST1 and Transforming
Musicology2; this will be adapted and augmented for the specific purposes of TROMPA. It combines
use of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format for representing musical documents with a
semantic approach tailored to the requirements of musicians and music scholars, using Linked Data.
This document describes the essentials of the Digital Score Edition component and summarises
how they will be put to use in various use-cases. It largely focuses on new elements being introduced
for TROMPA, in particular, methods for user-contributed and automated annotations which preserve
provenance and maintain user control; to a large extent this is ground-breaking work, so some
research questions (see 1.2 Annotations and links) remain open.
The Digital Score Edition component of TROMPA closely interacts with the Contributor
Environment (WP5 - TROMPA Contributor Environment) via TROMPA’s Data Infrastructure (TR-D5.1-
Data Infrastructure v1). We expect it to find use to a greater or lesser extent in the following Tasks:
3.2 (Music description); 3.4 (Visual analysis of scores); 3.6 (Multimodal cross-linking); 5.3
(Multimodal integration of music data); 5.4 (Music performance assessment mechanisms); 6.2 (Pilot
for music scholars); 6.3 (Pilot for orchestras); 6.4 (Pilot for instrument players); 6.5 (Pilot for singers)