Conference Agenda

In 2018, Byzantine chant was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List. As a living tradition over 2000 years old, its history is rich and multilayered. Translating its written tradition into a machine-readable format is a daunting task, due to the intricacy of its musical signs and the multifarious combinations, conveying subtle musical meanings. The interpretation of these neumes has also changed over time and across regions, often leading to scholarly disagreement. This, in turn, makes the encoding even more complex, especially regarding the choice of the interpretation to be retained.

Our group of leading experts of Byzantine chant has selected 32 neumes of the Chrysanthine Notation (ca. early 19th c.-today), free of scholar’s controversy, regarding their usage and rendition. Each neume is accompanied by relevant information such as its Greek name in various scripts, transliteration and phonetic transcription, intervallic interpretation according to both Byzantine and Western music theory, notational type and additional comments where necessary.

We propose for the first time a taxonomy and the encoding of these initial 32 neumes in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format. Our goal is that this pilot project will lead into a MEI customization for Byzantine neumes. While being focused on a small sample of neumes, this project is ground-breaking for its novelty and because it shifts the Western-centred focus of MEI. This project promotes the transmission, study and understanding of Byzantine chant and contributes to protect this repertory by enabling it to be documented in new and more comprehensive ways.

Muscat, RISM's cataloging system, can accommodate musical sources with language content written in non-Roman scripts such as Greek, however searching for these materials can be challenging, especially if the text has been transliterated into the Latin alphabet, possibly with inadvertent errors. This problem is not unique to RISM: it is shared across all library databases, and originated in the evolution from handwritten library catalogues to machine-readable systems.

Today, technological solutions such as Unicode have granted RISM and other catalogues the ability to display text in transliteration (useful to those who do not know the original language) and in the script of the source (essential to those who do know the language). The advent of artificial intelligence tools adjacent or native to cataloguing systems offers further opportunities for RISM catalogers thus to enhance their records.

A team comprised of members of the RISM Coordinating Committee will share workflows and best practices demonstrating how we have used Library of Congress Romanization resources, the expertise of our colleagues, and artificial intelligence to display non-Roman scripts such as Cyryllic, Arabic, Korean and Hebrew in RISM records. Our goals are to summarize the tools currently available, as well as to propose new directions for the responsible and trustworthy use of AI to describe music sources in Muscat.

Muscat, le système de catalogage du RISM, permet de traiter des sources musicales dont le contenu textuel est rédigé dans des écritures non latines, telles que le grec ; toutefois, la recherche de ces documents peut s'avérer complexe, en particulier si le texte a été translittéré dans l'alphabet latin, parfois avec des erreurs involontaires. Ce problème n'est pas propre au RISM : il est commun à l'ensemble des bases de données bibliothécaires et trouve son origine dans la transition des catalogues de bibliothèque manuscrits vers les systèmes lisibles par machine.

Aujourd'hui, des solutions technologiques telles qu'Unicode ont conféré au RISM, ainsi qu'à d'autres catalogues, la capacité d'afficher les textes à la fois sous forme translittérée (ce qui est utile pour ceux qui ne maîtrisent pas la langue d'origine) et dans l'écriture propre à la source (ce qui est essentiel pour ceux qui connaissent cette langue). L'avènement d'outils d'intelligence artificielle — qu'ils soient complémentaires aux systèmes de catalogage ou intégrés nativement à ceux-ci — offre aux catalogueurs du RISM de nouvelles opportunités pour enrichir leurs notices.

Une équipe composée de membres du Comité de coordination du RISM présentera des flux de travail et des bonnes pratiques illustrant la manière dont nous avons mis à profit les ressources de romanisation de la Bibliothèque du Congrès, l'expertise de nos collègues et l'intelligence artificielle pour afficher des écritures non latines — telles que le cyrillique, l'arabe, le coréen et l'hébreu — au sein des notices du RISM. Nos objectifs sont de dresser un panorama des outils actuellement disponibles, ainsi que de proposer de nouvelles orientations pour une utilisation responsable et fiable de l'IA dans la description des sources musicales au sein de Muscat.

This presentation highlights a significant yet largely overlooked body of Byzantine musical heritage associated with Nikolaos Mavropoulos (1888–1980), a distinguished chanter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople who later served in Patras and Athens, Greece.

His personal collection which consists of original compositions of his own as well as, of other distinguished cantors and composers of byzantine chant of the early twentieth century, has been arbitrarily divided in two parts and sold to flee markets and auctions by his heirs. These two distinct collections of what is known today as ‘the Nikolaos Mavropoulos Archives’ have been rescued through acquisitions by the Library of Music Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri” respectively.

The collection acquired by the Library of Musical Studies consists of 68 manuscripts and has been fully catalogued at item level in MUSCAT. Furthermore, it became the pilot project which introduced music sources in RISM’s cataloguing program that are outside of the western canon. The other collection acquired by the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri”, richer in number of composers, compositions (130 manuscripts) and variety of papers has been organized but not yet catalogued.

The paper will focus on how MUSCAT can host separated archival collections and present them virtually unified, for the benefit of research by scholars and performers.B