We describe a system for the entry and editing of music in lute tablature form, including an editor application and a web application. The text editor provides instant visual and audio feedback, mouse and keyboard controls, a macro recording facility and full interactive extensibility; the web application provides on-line rendering, dissemination of scores to users, and facilities for information retrieval over a corpus.
The ECOLM project aims to collect a corpus of European Lute Music and provide easy access to the material for scholars and performers. A textual encoding for lute music has been devised (TabCode, with text-critical information in TabXML) and shown to work well, and work is ongoing to collect and encode sources. The editor application is in development to support the encoding process, providing instant feedback and incremental rendering.
To provide access to the material, we are developing a web application. This has less need for instant incremental feedback, though we do provide for visual display and audio performance of encoded works; however, we must also provide for retrieval of sources based on musical and musicological criteria.
We shall demonstrate prototypes of these components, and discuss how the underlying technologies can support other applications in the humanities.