Musical-linguistic annotations of Il Lauro Secco

The Italian madrigal, a polyphonic secular a cappella composition of the 16^th century, is characterised by a strong musical-linguistic relationship, which has made it an icon of the ‘Renaissance humanism’. In madrigals, lyrical meaning is mimicked by the music, through the utilisation of a composition technique known as madrigalism. The synergy between Renaissance music and poetry makes madrigals of great value to musicologists, linguists, and historians—thus, it is a promising repertoire for computational musicology. However, the application of computational techniques for automatic detection of madrigalisms within scores of such repertoire is limited by the lack of annotations to refer to. In this regard, we present 30 madrigals of the anthology Il Lauro Secco encoded in two symbolic formats, MEI and **kern, with hand-encoded annotations of madrigalisms. This work aims to encourage the development of algorithms for madrigalism detection, a composition procedure typical of early music, but still underrepresented in music information retrieval research.