Skip to main content
Motetus Medieval polyphony in its manuscripts
For edition projects

What the platform does

Motetus is built from the parts an online edition of medieval music needs. Each of them works here on public data and can be checked on the pages linked below.

The score beside the page

  • Notation rendered from MEI. Editions are engraved in the browser with Verovio from their MEI encoding and shown beside the manuscript leaf they come from, with zones linking score and image: Sumer is icumen in.
  • What survives and what the editor added. Editorial additions are marked, voices realised by rule are shown apart from the notated ones, and a switch shows only what survives: Deo gracias Anglia.
  • Downloads. Every edition offers its MEI file and a MIDI rendering: all editions.

Sources and their contents

  • Catalogue and inventories. Manuscripts, the pieces they transmit in folio order, and their composers, browsed and filtered: fragmentary sources, pieces, composers.
  • Other ways in. Compare manuscripts side by side, the map and the timeline.
  • Search without a server. A static index searches manuscripts, pieces and composers in the browser: search.
  • Live catalogue data. The DIAMM catalogue is queried from the browser through its public API, and every record links back to DIAMM: search DIAMM live.

Images stay with the libraries

  • IIIF throughout. Manuscripts are read through each library's own IIIF manifest and image service, with deep zoom. Nothing is copied, and the library's attribution and rights statement are shown wherever its images appear.
  • Sign-in for restricted images. Where an image provider requires readers to sign in, we add the IIIF Authorization Flow 2.0 to the viewer: it probes the image's access service, opens the provider's sign-in, and reloads the image once access is granted.

Built to last

  • Plain files. The whole site is generated as static HTML by an automated build, with no database and no server to run. It can be hosted on GitHub Pages or any static host, and archived as it is.
  • Checked before publication. The build validates the data and the MEI encodings and checks every link. Release checks include accessibility tests against WCAG 2.2 AA rules and functional tests in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit.
  • Open data. The compiled data is published under an open licence: open data.

Who builds it

Motetus is built and operated by AEM Ventures SRL, which builds edition websites of this kind for research projects. To discuss a project, write to [email protected].