Following the success of last year's workshop series, which featured experts from the classification system Iconclass, we began another round in July 2026, this time focusing on musicological annotation tools. The aim was to provide – from a musicological perspective – an overview of a variety of annotation tools and metadata standards in the context of interdisciplinary projects.

The event was a joint effort of our consortium NFDI4Culture and HERMES, the data competence centre for cultural studies and humanities. It was at an earlier HERMES Open Colloquium event that a participant, when asked what topics might be of interest, mentioned annotation tools for musicology. We were delighted that this joint workshop could answer that request from the community.

The workshop was held in English to open the event to an international audience. In our second project phase of NFDI4Culture internationalization is one of our main strategic fields, alongside artificial intelligence and data quality management. Therefore, we were particularly pleased to welcome many international guests to the event. In total we had 72 registrations with around 20 registrations from outside Germany.

RECAP OF DAY I

The first day of the workshop was all about annotations i.e. “the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information“ (Sanderson et al. 2017) - as the citation shown to us by Anna Plaksin (Kreativ.Institut OWL) and David M. Weigl (Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien) highlighted in the first input talk.

The presentation and hands on session introduced the worfklows and elements of the mei-friend editor. This editor is closely linked to the Verovio tool, presenting a useful interface aiding with the annotation of musical scores in MEI. After a short and informative introductory presentation the hands-on session constituted the main part of this first hour of the workshop. In this practical part participants annotated excerpts from Ludwig Baumanns (1866-1944) „Mondnacht am Meer“, learning about the main features of the mei-friend editor as well as some more niche gadgets.

The next web based tool called CATMA – which stands for „computer assisted text markup and analysis“ –, was shown by Evelyn Gius (TU Darmstadt). It provides explorative workflows for text annotations which can also be used for musicological texts. After a short overview of the most important facts on CATMA she dived straight into a hands-on session, getting all participants to log into CATMA, create their own projects and work collaboratively on text material. For the group annotations she had prepared the lyrics by Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) “Winterreise” and demonstrated how the tool not only enabled users to collaboratively apply their own tags but also to automatically analyse the text. Results for example showed that one of the words most frequently to appear in the text were the words “Herz” and “Schnee". The simple approach made the tool easily accessible.

And finally we heard a talk by Frithjof Bömcke-Vollmer (Universität Paderborn), Nike Lange (Folkwang Universität der Künste) and William Lepp (Universität Paderborn) about the audio annotation tool Sonic Visualiser – where we in fact saw “visualized sound” such as waveforms, spectrograms and spectrums. Audio examples and musical excerpts, amongst others by the composer Johanna Martzy (1924–1979), underlined the graphical representations and was a welcome addition to the workshop. Furthermore insights are given on how it can be used to measure different tempi or speeds of musical pieces, and how it can be employed not only for audio examples but also visual material. The team currently works for the DFG funded project Conceptualising a Digital Performance Edition, where Andreas Münzmay (Co-Spokesperson of the Cultural Research Academy) is also involved.

RECAP OF DAY II

The second day was all about organising and enriching research results. The morning started with a presentation by Hans Brandhorst (Iconclass), chief editor of Iconclass. This widely recognized classification system designed for visual arts and cultural objects is used by numerous museums and libraries around the world. It provides subject access to collections. In NFDI4Culture Iconclass has become an integral part in the Knowledge Graph to connect in particular interdiscipilinary collections at a content level. In his presentation of Iconclass Hans focused on how musicological related aspects in visual objects can be classified. In the following discussion it was emphasized that Iconclass is not only – if however often used – for classifying the content of visual objects but also audio material. Thus, for example Schubert’s “Winterreise” - presented in the CATMA session - could easily be classified with terms such as for example “heart” or  “jilted lover” and “desolated man”.

Kristina Richts-Matthaei (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz) presented the MerMEId, an open-source MEI Metadata Editor. She talked shortly about the tools history and then focused on current features and new developments on the tool. In one of her current projects MerMEIding to the future, the MerMEId is further developed. In that project a focus is lying on enabling the creation of high-quality music-related and “autonomous metadata” in accordance with the FAIR principles for raising the data quality and sustainability in musicology. Concluding her presentation Kristina showed some features of the MerMEId MeLODy, a browser based version of the editor, currently in its beta phase.

Martha Stellmacher (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB)) gave an overview of discipline specific repositories in NFDI4Culture and presented our Helpdesk, which provides individual advice and support for researchers and cultural heritage institutions. It was an ideal closure to showing how theses annotations and research results can be published and interconnected. She started with an interactive Mentimeter which was a refreshing break, in which she asked how familiar the audience are with publication services in the field of musicology.   
Following the presentation of the Sonic Visualizer on day one we discussed how annotations could be referenced or linked to within the different annotation tools. Frithjof Bömcke-Vollmer and David Weigl assured that this was something they were currently working in their respective projects. So far in order to link or cite specific annotations they still need to be exported and published. Martha’s presentation provided valuable recommendations on where exported annotation datasets can be published and where help can be sought.

In the final discussion Hans Brandhorst added a few words about a research project at the Uppsala University by Jan von Bonsdorff and Tobias Plebuch "Charting Visual and Musical Moods and Metaphors: Facilitating Cross-Modal Connections for Machine Learning and Multimodal AI", which had been presented at a previous Iconclass Workshop. The project applies Iconclass to classify individual musical accompaniments to silent movies according to their mood and atmosphere.

The workshop presented different annotation tools, classification systems, metadata integration and showed, how tools, that originated from other disciplines, are also perfectly suitable for musicological research. The workshops goal was, to present a range of tools and systems, that on the one hand, like MerMEId and the mei-friend or Sonic Visualiser, originated in the field of musicology. On the other hand came from other disciplines, with the potential to be used in musicological research such as CATMA or Iconclass.

Given the variety of data types that musicologists use in their research, it can be beneficial to look beyond one's own field to find suitable tools. With this workshop we were able to ignite that spark and plan to target other NFDI4Culture communites and tools in the near future.

Bibliography

Sanderson, Robert; Ciccarese, Paolo; Young, Benjamin (2017): Web Annotation Data Model, W3C Recommendation, 23 February 2017, URL:   
www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-annotation-model-20170223/