TextGrid : Create and Modify MEI Documents

A brand-new created MEI Item already displays a music sheet in four-four time with only one measure and no notes within. The Outline View and the Properties View appear showing the structure of the MEI document. On how to open a new MEI document see "Open the MEI Score Editor". Now you can create new elements for your score.

Staff

"ScoreDef" is a default element and not deletable. Under the “ScoreDef” element you can create the score declarations “StaffGroup” and “StaffDef”.

You start with a "StaffGroup" which is a group of bracketed or braced staves. A “StaffGroup” contains lines with clef and time signature. Clicking left on a “StaffGroup” element in the Palette in the „Create Staves“ section and pulling it on the “ScoreDef” element in the Outline View while keeping the left mouse button down, you will see no visible results like scores or staves in the Musical Score View, which is absolutely right.

Now you can pull a "StaffDef" element, which is a container for staff meta-information, from the Palette on the “StaffGroup” element in the Outline View. In the figure below three “StaffDef” elements are added and named with Staffdef 1, Staffdef 2 and Staffdef 3. How to name a staff and some other possible options to change or initialize properties of the single “StaffDef” in the Properties View are also shown in this figure.

Container Creation

The "Section" element is a container for actual music data. “Section” is not a subelement from “ScoreDef”, so you do not have to pull it on the “ScoreDef” element but in the white space underneath the “ScoreDef/StaffGroup/StaffDef” section. Since it is a container, no visible results will be shown in the Musical Score View.

The same non-visible effect has the "Measure" element which you have to pull on the “Section” element in the Outline View, because it is just a container of the content for a measure.

After pulling a "Staff" element from the Palette on the “Measure” element in the Outline View, you see the measure with its staff on the left. In the screen shot below, there are the three “Staffdefs” and four measures, called Measure 1-4. To illustrate the fact that the staves belong to their measure, the different measures have different numbers of staves. Before you start creating notes and rests, a container for that kind of events is required.

That is why you have to create a "Layer" element on the staff in the Outline View as is shown in the next figure. You can only add events to a “Layer”, a creation directly within a staff is not allowed.

Event: Note, Rest, Beam and Chord

As mentioned in the paragraph above, it is necessary to create a “Layer” before you are able to add an event as a quarter note.

To create a "Note", you have to create a “Note” element on a “Layer” in the Outline View. The default properties (e.g. Duration and Octave 4, Pitchname c) of this note are shown in the Properties View. In the figure below the table some properties of the note in the second measure, which you can edit in the Properties View, are demonstrated. All editing possibilities are listed in the following table:

In figure A you can see the result of the use of the property “Syllable” (text under a note), which you can modify for every note. It is the beginning of a German Christmas song. The value of the property “Syllable” is displayed under the note, to which you added this element. Figure B shows an excerpt of its corresponding source code in MEI, where you can see the usage of a “Syllable” element.

A "Rest" is created in the same way like a note. You have to pull it on the “Layer” of the “Staff” you want the rest to be situated in. In the Properties View you can change the duration of a rest.

A "Space" is created in the same way like a note or a rest. After adding a “Space” element no visible result will be seen. It is visible in the context of use with other events, because it acts as a placeholder between two events like two notes. The user can also define its duration.

The MEI Score Editor is not only able to show single notes, but also connected ones. On this purpose, you have to pull a "Beam" or a "Chord" from the Palette on a “Layer”. Afterwards you can add notes on the “Beam” or “Chord” element in the Outline View. An example for the creation of a beam and a chord is given in the figure below . The editable properties of a chord are “Articulation”, “Dots”, “Duration”, “Note count”, “Stem direction” and “Stem length”, and also "Timestamp".

Alternatively, you can use the context menu of the Outline View for the creation of new elements as children to an existing element. Please use the items "Insert Container/Variant/Event" and "Add Additions..." in the context menu depending on whether they appear there. Since the MEI Schema has strict rules defining the allowed occurrences of elements and their use, the modification of the content has to follow certain policies. To guide the user's workflow and reduce the learning curve for MEI, the context menu offers a convenient subset of the most often used elements that are valid for creation at the given location, as shown in the figure stated below. Under Windows adding childs via context menu is only achievable when the MEI Object is opened in the XML Editor.

When you open an already existing MEI document that has not been created with the MEI Score Editor, it is possible that there are "Unknown Elements" displayed in the Outline View. Not every possible element and attribute from the Music Encoding Initiative data format is implemented (yet) into the MEI Score Editor. These elements and attributes are not being erased or ignored by the editor, but represented as an object with a question mark entitled “Unknown Element”. Furthermore the name of this unknown element is shown as a property in the Properties View. For an example see the last figure stated below. In the source code of the MEI document the four staves of the example have a fermata in measure 4, which can not be displayed by the MEI Score Editor (yet).