ECOLM - An Electronic Corpus of Lute Music

ECOLM is an ambitious research project conceived by Tim Crawford and funded between 1999 and 2006 by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The first phase of the project (1999-2002) was carried out in the Department of Music at King’s College London.

The second phase of ECOLM, also funded by the AHRB (2002-6), is being carried out in the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group in the Goldsmiths College Department of Computing under the general direction of Prof. Geraint Wiggins, and continues to be guided by its originator, Tim Crawford.

The principal goal of ECOLM is to store and make accessible to scholars, players and others, full-text encodings of sources of music for the Western-European lute (and other relevant sources), together with graphical images from manuscripts and printed music, such codicological and paleographical detail as is helpful to the potential users, and bibliographical data, including, if possible, the texts of important studies where necessary permissions can be obtained.

Relevant ‘other’ sources might include keyboard versions of lute pieces, but would where possible also be full-text encodings. They would typically comprise music for keyboard, wind or string instruments, especially the viola da gamba, or vocal ensemble.

The technical resources of ECOLM will include facilities for online searching of the bibliographical and musical material, and complete access via the World Wide Web (with suitable restrictions according to the classes of material and user). Also viewing, playing (via computer sound-system or MIDI) of lute music, and printing (again subject to relevant permissions).

This website contains information about the project and its contributors and also hosts corpus itself public use. Also on these pages you will find documentation for the tablature encoding format, TabCode and the MySQL database and its web front end.Visitors who have been supplied with a username and password can also log-in for extended features.