Encoding ancient Greek musical notation
- Ancient Greek music used two parallel systems of notation: one vocalic, one instrumental
- Unicode’s representation of these notes is ambiguous: graphically identical vocal and instrumental code points not distinguished
- We follow the encoding of Greek musical notation defined in the Holy Cross undergraduate thesis of Zach Sowerby (HC ’19) using URNs to identify musical notation
Sowerby URN notation
- All URNs are in the namespace
urn:cite2:zst:(assumed in short forms used in this package) - There are two collections:
gvn(vocal) andgin(instrumental) - Notes (object identifiers) have up to five dot-separated tiers of note citation :
- base note
- sharpenings of the base note
- length value: diseme, triseme, tetraseme, and pentaseme
- arsis dot (stigme): 1 indicates arsis, or the lack of metrical emphasis (in comparison to thesis, or metrical emphasis)
- hyphen: when present (1) indicates multiple notes sounded over a single syllable
Realizing notes in Unicode
The first two dotted values (base note and its sharpenings) together can be mapped to Unicode code points. This table their possible values.1
Examples of finding Unicode code points: gvn:1.1 (vocal E) and gvn:1.2. (vocal first sharp of E). Both are in vocal notation collection (gvn); both refer to same base pitch (gvn:1); the second tier distinguishes E (gvn:1.1, mapped to 𝈀) from the first sharp of E (gvn:1.2, mapped to 𝈁).
Full examples: gvn:11.1.1.0.0 encodes a note in Greek vocal notation (gvn collection). It identifies the first sharp of note 11 (gvn:11.1), vocal a, with Unicode visualization Ϲ. Its length value is 1 (gvn:11.1.1), implying no additional diseme, triseme, tetraseme, or pentaseme. It has no arsis or hyphen the last two pieces of (gvn:11.1.1.0.0).