The Morris Dancers
Andrew Bullen
| The Morris Dancers. G.D.
Wilson. Boston: White, Smith & Co., 1878.
Part of Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, Library of Congress, Music Division |
I first became aware of the sheet music to The Morris
Dancers from Country Dance and Song, volume 21, 1991. For this
issue, I wanted to explore how to bring this music to life. I downloaded the TIFF images from the American Memory Project
website (http://memory.loc.gov/),
which were then "read' into Visiv's
SharpEye 2 optical musical scanning software program. Depending on
the cleanliness of the original, this process has an error rate of 70-95%. All errors had to be manually corrected, using
SharpEye's very nice editing features.
The assembled OCR score, once corrected, was then exported
into MIDI format, where it was then opened up in Myriad's
Harmony Assistant program. This was preferred, because it allowed a
very sophisticated series of instruments and playback options. The reverb is what we
imagine this tune would have sounded like had it been played in a music hall
in 1880. The file was then exported into
mp3 format and ABC format.
Enjoy the music of the Morris Dancer!
| AMN,
Vol.
25, No. 4, December 2005 |
ISSN:
1074-2689 |
|
