A Guided tour of the KernScores website

Goto: [ Browsing | Searching | Translations | Analyses ]

Browsing

    You can browse though the collection of scores in the KernScores website starting on this page which is also accessible from the main page on the hyperlink Browse by Collection.

    In the browsing section of the website, you can always view three levels of the organization hierarchy at a time, unless the lower levels contain too much information. Each level on the current page is displayed with a differently colored arrow:

      A top level item
      A secondary level item
      A tertiary level item

    If you are viewing a page that contains musical scores, the titles of the scores will be listed in a table such as for the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I:

    zip       Humdrum File  MIDI File  Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846
         Humdrum File  MIDI File  Fugue No. 1 in C major, BWV 846
         Humdrum File  MIDI File  Prelude No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847
         Humdrum File  MIDI File  Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847
         Humdrum File  MIDI File  Prelude No. 3 in C-sharp major, BWV 848
         Humdrum File  MIDI File  Fugue No. 3 in C-sharp major, BWV 848
    etc.

    Clicking on the score's title will take you to a detailed description of the score. To the left of each score are a set of buttons. These buttons allow you to download the musical data for that score:

      = Download all Humdrum score files on the current page in the ZIP archive format. This ZIP file is generated on demand. This button is always present next to the first score on any page.
      = If this icon is present to the left of the title information, it indicates that a printable scores for the music is available in the PDF format (typically in the US Letter format). Here is a list of music with printable scores.
      = View the Humdrum file with **kern musical data.
      = Access a Standard MIDI File created from the **kern data with the Humdrum tool smf (well, at least a related program called hum2mid). This file is generated on demand directly from the **kern score.

    Clicking on the "KernScores" title at the top of any page in the browsing section of the website will take you back to the front page.

Searching

    Enter searchable text in the search box on the main page. For example the following search will find matches for the Chorales of J.S. Bach. Click in the following search box, and press enter to view the search results. Note that it is better to list searches in the singular form.
      search:

    Text which you want to search for in a specific ordering can be surrounded in quotes. Click in the search box below and press enter to search for all compositions in C minor.

      search:

Data Translation

    The Humdrum **kern data format can be converted automatically into several other types of data. These conversions are available from the pages describing individual Humdrum files under the section labeled Data Format Translations at the bottom of each page. Click here for such an example information page. The current data formats available at KernScores are listed below. Samples of the data for each type can be viewed by clicking on an icon in the sample column.

      Data FormatSampleDescription
    • Humdrum File
      		• The primary musical data format for this website. All other data formats listed below are generated from this data.
    • Standard MIDI File
      		• A common data format for playback with synthesizers.
    • Director Musices Data
      		• X Data for use with the Director Musices program that generates a modeled musical performance of scores.
    • Melisma Notes File
      		• X Data for use with Melisma Music Analyzer programs to analyze meter, chord and key of the input music.
    • MusicXML
      		• X Musical data encoded in XML, which provides data conversions to/from CCARH's MuseData format and Coda's Finale music typesetting program.
    • STK SKINI Format
      		•  X Musical data for playing physical model instruments in the Synthesis Toolkit library.
    • Guido Music Notation
      		•  X Musical data for printing musical scores.
    • PDF File
      		• Adobe Portable Document Format which contains a printable form of the score. Usually not converted automatically but is possible for simpler scores using the Humdrum Toolkit program ms.

    Music Analyses

      At the bottom of the individual Humdrum file pages, there is a section called "Analyses" which contains links to several types of analysis done in real-time on the music files.

      For example, clicking on the Piano Roll options for the example Brahms waltz given above, you can view the piano-roll notation of the score, colored differently for each hand:

      Also, you can view the piano roll score according to the metric level of the note-attacks:

      Clicking on the keyscape analysis option will generate an plot of the harmonic structure in the composition. In this case, the most prominent color in the picture represents the tonic which is B major. The second strongest color is red in the second half of the music which represents E major (the subdominant key).