CCARH Publications

42 Ojibway Songs, encoded by Paul von Hippel, 1998.

Individual songs
Zipped collection
Catalog of notated themes

From the README file:
42 Ojibway Songs in the Humdrum **kern Representation:
Electronic Transcriptions from the Densmore Collections
by Paul von Hippel, 1998

These melodies were sampled at random from Frances Densmore's (1909, 1912) two volumes of music by the Ojibway Indians of northern Minnesota. The random sample included only songs that were fully transcribed in common music notation -- not, that is, those songs represented only by an Ojibway "song picture" or by one of Densmore's analytic sketches.

All of the melodies use the **kern format and so can be analyzed using David Huron's Humdrum Toolkit software for music analysis (www.humdrum.org). Besides the standard Humdrum reference records, these transcriptions include records beginning "!!!PPG" to indicate the page number on which Densmore's transcription originally appeared.

In addition to the standard **kern signifiers, the following signifiers are adapted from Densmore's transcriptions:

`>`	indicates that the note is sung less than a semitone above the notated pitch
`<`	indicates that the note is sung less than a semitone below the notated pitch

Densmore's common-music transcriptions contain much information that is not incorporated into this electronic edition. In particular,

Many of the songs were accompanied by a drum. The drum played a short repeating rhythmic pattern, which often used a different meter and tempo from the sung part.
Some of the songs had lyrics -- a mixture of Ojibway words and nonsense syllables. Neither the lyrics nor the drum parts have been incorporated into this electronic edition.
Some of the songs included articulations and (often incomplete) phrasing information.

The electronic transcriptions were checked for errors using four different methods (Huron, 1988). First, syntactic errors were sought using the Humdrum proof command. Second, melodic intervals of unusual types (diminished, augmented, and compound intervals, as well as sevenths) were checked against the paper score. Third, common-music notation was generated from the electronic transcriptions using the Humdrum ms tool (which would not accept some of the files), and a cursory visual check was made for glaring errors. Finally, five of the melodies, comprising 86 pitch-rhythm records, were selected at random for re-entry. The re-entered melodies were compared to the original transcriptions using the "diff" command, and only one pitch error in the originals was found. This finding is consistent with the idea that at least half of the original transcriptions were free of pitch errors (p<.05).

Scholars using these transcriptions for research purposes should cite the database as follows:

von Hippel, Paul (Ed.). (1998) 42 Ojibway songs in the
     Humdrum **kern representation: Electronic transcriptions from
     the Densmore collections [computer database]. Center for
     Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Stanford, CA
     (www.ccarh.org/publications/data/humdrum/ojibway).

References

Densmore, F. (1909) Chippewa [i.e., Ojibway] Music, Bulletin 45 of the
Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office.

Densmore, F. (1912) Chippewa [i.e., Ojibway] Music--II, Bulletin 53 of
the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution. Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Huron, D. (1988) Error categories, detection, and reduction in a musical
database. Computers and the Humanities 22: 253-264.