A Diplomatic Edition of Il Lauro Secco: Ground Truth for OMR of White Mensural Notation

Early musical sources in white mensural notation—the most common notation in European printed music during the Renaissance—are nowadays preserved by libraries worldwide trough digitalisation. Still, the application of music information retrieval to this repertoire is restricted by the use of digitalisation techniques which produce an uncodified output. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) automatically generates a symbolic representation of image-based musical content, thus making this repertoire reachable from the computational point of view; yet, further improvements are often constricted by the limited ground truth available. We address this lacuna by presenting a symbolic representation in original notation of Il Lauro Secco, an anthology of Italian madrigals in white mensural notation. For musicological analytic purposes, we encoded the repertoire in **mens and MEI formats; for OMR ground truth, we automatically codified the repertoire in agnostic and semantic formats, via conversion from the **mens files.