The EsAC Collection: Origins, New Musical Resources, and Technical Developments

Peer-reviewed

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. 




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Published
2025-12-31

Cited by

Dahlig-Turek, E., Matuszewska, A. M., & Sapp, C. S. (2025). The EsAC Collection: Origins, New Musical Resources, and Technical Developments . Muzyka, 70(4), 109–123. https://doi.org/10.36744/m.4695

Authors

Ewa Dahlig-Turek 

Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1895-8594

Authors

Anna Maria Matuszewska 

Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3832-855X

Authors

Craig Stuart Sapp 

Stanford University United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8865-3177

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