The EsAC Collection: Origins, New Musical Resources, and Technical Developments
Ewa Dahlig-Turek
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1895-8594
Anna Maria Matuszewska
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3832-855X
Craig Stuart Sapp
Stanford University (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8865-3177
Abstract
The EsAC (Essener Assoziativ Code), developed in the 1980s with tools for editing and analysis, is among the most important formats in digital musicology. Its core dataset, the Essen Folksong Collection, inspired many related projects worldwide. A key example is the Polish corpus of over 20,000 transcriptions from Oskar Kolberg’s Complete Works, encoded in EsAC (2014–22) and later converted to Humdrum. The article outlines EsAC syntax, the Polish dataset, and new Verovio Humdrum Viewer features supporting both formats for in-depth analysis.
References
Bronson, Bertrand H. ‘Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song.’ The Journal of American Folklore 62, no. 244 (1949): 81–86. doi.org/10.2307/536303.
Google Scholar
Dürrenmatt, Hans-Rudolf, Murray Gould, and Jan Larue. ‘Die Notierung thematischer Incipits auf “Mark-Sense-Cards”: Thematisch-bibliographische Katalogisierung im Zeitraum von 1600–1800 mit Hilfe elektronischer Datenverarbeitung.’ Fontes Artis Musicae 17, nos. 1–2 (1970): 15–23.
Google Scholar
Erickson, Raymond F. ‘Music and the Computer in the Sixties.’ In: Proceedings of the May 5–7, 1970, Spring Joint Computer Conference, 281–285. Montvale: AFIPS Press, 1970 (= AFIPS Conference Proceedings 36). doi.org/10.1145/1476936.1476983.
Google Scholar
Jesser, Barbara. Interaktive Melodieanalyse: Methodik und Anwendung computergestützter Analyseverfahren in Musikethnologie und Volksliederforschung: Typologische Untersuchung der Balladensammlung des DVA. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991.
Google Scholar
Kaszuby, eds. Ludwik Bielawski, Aurelia Mioduchowska, and Janina Szymańska. 3 vols. Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1997–98 (= Polska Pieśń i Muzyka Ludowa 2).
Google Scholar
Larue, Jan, and Mary Rasmussen. ‘Numerical Incipits for Thematic Catalogues.’ Fontes Artis Musicae 9, no. 2 (1962): 72–75.
Google Scholar
Lincoln, Harry B. ‘Some Criteria and Techniques for Developing Computerized Thematic Indices.’ In: Elektronische Datenverarbeitung in der Musikwissenschaft, ed. Hans Heckmann, 57–60. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1967.
Google Scholar
Matuszewska, Anna Maria. ‘Visual Presentation and Exploration of Musical Corpora: Case Study: Oskar Kolberg’s Opera Omnia.’ In: DLfM ‘23: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, ed. Martha E. Thomae, 82–85. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023. doi.org/10.1145/3625135.3625148.
Google Scholar
Mendel, Arthur. ‘Some Preliminary Attempts at Computer-Assisted Style Analysis in Music.’ Computers and the Humanities 4, no. 1 (1969): 41–52.
Google Scholar
Sagrillo, Damien. Melodiegestalten im luxemburgischen Volkslied: Zur Anwendung computergestützter Verfahren bei der Klassifikation von Volksliedabschnitten. 2 vols. Bonn: Holos, 1999.
Google Scholar
Schaffrath, Helmut. ‘The Essen Associative Code: A Code for Folksong Analysis.’ In: Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes, ed. Eleanor Selfridge-Field, 343–361. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Google Scholar
Schaffrath, Helmut. The Essen Folksong Collection in Kern Format. Data set, ed. David Huron. Stanford: Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, 1995. https://kern.humdrum.org/cgi-bin/ksdata?file=README.txt&l=essen&format=kern, accessed 15 October 2025.
Google Scholar
Steinbeck, Wolfram. Struktur und Ähnlichkeit: Methoden automatisierter Melodienanalyse. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1982.
Google Scholar
Warmia i Mazury, eds. Barbara Krzyżaniak, Aleksander Pawlak, and Monika Gruchmanowa. 5 vols. Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2002 (= Polska Pieśń i Muzyka Ludowa 3).
Google Scholar
Authors
Ewa Dahlig-TurekInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1895-8594
Authors
Anna Maria MatuszewskaInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3832-855X
Statistics
Abstract views: 2PDF downloads: 0
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Ewa Dahlig-Turek, Anna Matuszewska, Craig Sapp

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The author grants the publisher a royalty-free nonexclusive licence (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Muzyka, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in "Muzyka" should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). By submitting an article the author agrees to make it available under CC BY 4.0 license.
Articles from 2018/1 to 2022/3 were published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. During this period the authors granted the publisher a royalty-free nonexclusive license (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in "Muzyka", retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
Most read articles by the same author(s)
- Anna Maria Matuszewska, Application of Diagrammatics in Computational Music Analysis , Muzyka: Vol. 68 No. 2 (2023)
- Ewa Dahlig-Turek, The Morphology of 'Polish Rhythms' in Oskar Kolberg’s 'Mazowsze Polne', in the Light of Research Using Music Information Retrieval , Muzyka: Vol. 66 No. 4 (2021)
- Ewa Dahlig-Turek, The Relationship between Body and Instrument in Traditional Violin Playing , Muzyka: Vol. 70 No. 4 (2025)


