The Neume Notation Project

Louis W. G. Barton


Lecturns at the Church of St. Walpurga
µ Neumatic Notation on Computer (Yale, 1995)

CONTENTS:

Neumatic Notation on Computer was my Senior Project at Yale University in the spring of 1995, when I returned there to finish my B.A. degree.
The gist of the project was to create a PostScript font for printing transcriptions of neumed chant
(see µ Samples of the Author's Neumed Font),
and adapt a commercial music-editing program to work with that font. Prof. James Grier and Prof. Peter J. Kindlmann supervised the project.
- L.B.

§ Glossary defines some terms used in font creation.
(See also Glossary of Musicological Terms.)

§ Project Proposal outlines steps for realizing the project, tools that would be used, and how they would fit together.

§ Technical Documentation: Creating a Font File outlines steps for creating a neumed font for Windows (can be adapted for other platforms).

§ Technical Documentation: Table of Correspondences lists cell numbers in the font and a description of the corresponding characters.

Personal Composer ™ is the music editor that was used for this project. It was written by Jim Miller in LISP and was the first commercially-available music/MIDI program. It is recognized today as "the easiest to learn and use of all the full-featured music software products."

§ Discussion of commercial music-editing programs.




Credits:
Lecturns in an ancient pattern at the Church of St. Walpurga (Zutpher, Holland; built 1561-3); photo reproduced from Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library, (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 11.


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Revision: 17 October 2003
Copyright © 2001-2003, Louis W. G. Barton