“l’arte del bene intavolare et rettamente sonare”: (De)coding 16th-Century Ornamentation Rules for Computational Analysis

This repository contains code and data of the poster presented at the Third International Conference on Computational and Cognitive Musicology. You will find the full abstract of the proposal and our poster above.

Summary

The poster presents the process of developing a computer-aided analysis based on the combined research of three members of the E-LAUTE project¹. Taking the output of the tabmapper tool, a module in the abtab toolbox (De Valk, 2024)², as the starting point, an aim to classify and detect different types of ornamentation within intabulations, lute arrangements of vocal music pieces (Janjuš, 2024)³, outlines the requirements for 1) an algorithm that detects these patterns in the tabmapper output (Jaklin, 2025)⁴ and 2) the evaluation of the algorithm’s performance.

Data and Methodology

The data for testing was taken from data collected for the JOSQUINTAB⁵ project: https://github.com/reinierdevalk/data. The included pieces are both intabulations (or instrumental arrangements, written in tablature) of the same song from Hans Newsidler's book⁶:

• 4400_45_ach_unfall_was: Ach unfall wes zeihest du mich, fol. o1r-o2v (pp. 111-114) and
• 4481_49_ach_unfal_wes_zeigst_du_mich: XLIX. Ach unfal wes zeigstu mich, fol. Ee1v-Ee3v (pp. 396-400).

These are instrumental arrangements of a song by Ludwig Senfl. The text begins with Ach vnfall was zichstu mich⁷ and is a contrafactum of Josquin Desprez's Qui belles amours. Only Josquin Desprez's version is provided in full and this was used as the vocal source for both intabulations. For this reason, a few minor adjustments were needed in the input files.

The methods or 'rules' used for analysing ornamentations were extracted from Hiroyuki Minamino's research on Galilei's book.^{8 9}

Contact

Olja Janjuš, @janjusolja ([email protected])
Julia Jaklin, @ohwjd ([email protected])
Reinier de Valk, @reinierdevalk ([email protected])

Footnotes

1. Project website: https://e-laute.info. Edition website: https://edition.onb.ac.at/context:elaute ↩

2. A part of the abtab toolbox that is being developed within the project. ↩

3. Part of the research for a doctoral thesis conducted within the project at LMU München. ↩

4. Part of the research for a bachelor's thesis conducted within the project at TU Wien. ↩

5. Reinier de Valk, Ryan Ahmed, Tim Crawford. "JOSQUINTAB: A dataset for content-based computational analysis of music in lute tablature", 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, 2019. ↩

6. Hans Newsidler. Ein Newgeordent Kuenstlich Lautenbuch Jn zwen theyl getheylt, Nuremberg, 1536 (facsimile). ↩

7. Tenor voice in CH-Bu F X 21, 18r (facimile). ↩

8. Hiroyuki Minamino. Sixteenth-century lute treatises with emphasis on process and techniques of intabulation, Doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1988. ↩

9. Vincenzo Galilei. Fronimo Dialogo sopra l'arte del bene intavolare et rettamente sonare la musica, Venice, 1584. ↩