Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LAUDARE (The Italian Lauda: Disseminating Poetry and Concepts Through Melody (12th-16th centuries))
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31
The lauda, a vibrant expression of popular piety, is the poetic-musical genre that from the second half of the twelfth century marked the birth and the spread of singing in the Italian language. It was based on melodies of varied origins, but mostly functional in orally conveying the dissemination of texts and (not only spiritual) concepts among a largely illiterate population. Despite this ‘volatility’, a good corpus of laude has been preserved in written form for ritual needs, sometimes with musical notation, forming an impressive repository of ‘frozen orality’. While realizing the importance and vastness of this heritage, scholars for over a century have been mainly engaged in alternatively considering it either from a literary or a musical point of view. Therefore, no systematic research has yet to shed light on the specific nature of the phenomenon, its dynamics of creation and transmission and all indicators that make it a reliable mirror of society, culture and mentality in medieval and early Renaissance Italy. The LAUDARE project aims to approach the Italian lauda in its intrinsic intermediality by collecting the whole corpus of texts handed down with music up to the mid 1500s and comprehensively exploring the dynamics of composition and transmission of poems and related tunes according to the mechanisms of orality. An open access database, making searchable the entire corpus, will allow wide-ranging surveys such as the territorial impact of a text and/or its musical setting as well as the diffusion of melodic patterns and text formulas. The results will be collected in a specific volume. Other expected outputs are a handbook, at least ten open access articles, three workshops and two international conferences with proceedings, one of which will have involved related disciplines such as medieval and religious history, linguistics, palaeography, iconography, anthropology, and urban studies.
In its first two years of activity, LAUDARE project has largely adhered to the plan and expectations outlined in the application. The first four post-doctoral students were recruited. From April 13 to 15, 2023, the University of Trento hosted the first workshop devoted to “Research and Image Acquisition”, titled “Singing as a Function: A Multidisciplinary Approach”. During the workshop, research guidelines and technological strategies for data acquisition were discussed, with input from other music computing specialists. This occasion also fostered productive interactions with teams from the Universities of Innsbruck, Montreal-McGill, Alicante, and the Biblioteca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute of Rome, aimed at sharing experiences in developing neural networks tailored for the acquisition of manuscripts combining text and music. The search for new lauda sources began in October 2022. Missions have so far been conducted in over twenty Italian cities, as well as in selected libraries in the United States, Spain, France, and England. A specific case, already subject to particular expectations, concerns the regions of Southern Italy (except for Sicily), so far almost entirely devoid of attestations up to the late Renaissance. To date, three missions have been conducted in Naples and one in some cities in the province of Bari, but no results have yet been achieved, despite the strong presence of lay confraternities, many of which remain active.
The musicologist and computer scientist teams collaborated to identify a proper relational structure for a database (WP 2). A backend has been constructed on the GSSI servers, and it is now ready for data entry. The database will ensure efficient and effective retrieval of lauda sources based on metadata and on their mutual relationships.The import process (WP 3) started with the two major monophonic laudari that have survived in their entirety – Cortona 91 and Banco Rari 18 of Florence – following an analysis of the layouts with their differing divisions of 'text' and 'music' fields, carried out for the moment using a mixed approach: READ Coop's Transkribus software for the text and McGill's Neon for melodies. Successively, the MEI and PageXML files produced by this software are transformed in standard and more suitable files, including MEI and TEI, which will serve as basis for the content analysis that we are going to start in the coming phase of the project.
Representation for Neumatic Notation: To ensure interoperability, we use established file formats like MEI, TEI, and PageXML while addressing challenges specific to their use. In computer vision, annotation formats such as PASCAL-VOC (XML-based) and COCO (JSON-based) are common. JSON's advantages, including smaller file size and better readability, make it a preferred choice. We developed a customized COCO JSON format to represent the complexity of lauda sources, integrating text and music. This innovation supports experimentation with advanced machine learning models and enhances the usability of the datasets for scientific benchmarking. Annotating Lauda Corpora is a specialized, time-intensive task, and no existing software fully captures their visual and musical complexity. To address this, we created a workflow, combining tools for text and music annotation with synchronized markers.
Cross-Disciplinary Research: To address the challenges inherent to the lauda genre, our project fosters continuous, critical dialogue among musicologists, ethnomusicologists, philologists, digital humanists, and computer scientists. Epistemological approaches and practical strategies proposed by team members are collaboratively examined, refined, and implemented. This ensures that methods and insights developed in one discipline are rigorously tested and effectively applied across others. This approach integrates practical tasks and source analysis. Technical and humanistic perspectives also converge in the project. Paleographical and codicological studies of ancient lauda manuscripts and printed books reveal how these sources were meticulously designed to facilitate the transmission and use of laude. Consequently, we aim to integrate the contextual and intertextual richness of historical lauda sources into the LAUDARE relational database. This approach seeks to preserve the historical sources' modes of presenting connections and relationships, offering modern users an experience akin to that of lauda singers.
The cross-disciplinary approach extends even beyond the LAUDARE team. In May 2023, we established a permanent scientific panel to explore the relationship between music and poetry. Sharing this knowledge beyond the academic sphere will not only enhance future surveys in libraries and archives but also raise awareness among non-specialists about a genre of Italian poetry and music that was remarkably popular from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.
The musicologist and computer scientist teams collaborated to identify a proper relational structure for a database (WP 2). A backend has been constructed on the GSSI servers, and it is now ready for data entry. The database will ensure efficient and effective retrieval of lauda sources based on metadata and on their mutual relationships.The import process (WP 3) started with the two major monophonic laudari that have survived in their entirety – Cortona 91 and Banco Rari 18 of Florence – following an analysis of the layouts with their differing divisions of 'text' and 'music' fields, carried out for the moment using a mixed approach: READ Coop's Transkribus software for the text and McGill's Neon for melodies. Successively, the MEI and PageXML files produced by this software are transformed in standard and more suitable files, including MEI and TEI, which will serve as basis for the content analysis that we are going to start in the coming phase of the project.
Representation for Neumatic Notation: To ensure interoperability, we use established file formats like MEI, TEI, and PageXML while addressing challenges specific to their use. In computer vision, annotation formats such as PASCAL-VOC (XML-based) and COCO (JSON-based) are common. JSON's advantages, including smaller file size and better readability, make it a preferred choice. We developed a customized COCO JSON format to represent the complexity of lauda sources, integrating text and music. This innovation supports experimentation with advanced machine learning models and enhances the usability of the datasets for scientific benchmarking. Annotating Lauda Corpora is a specialized, time-intensive task, and no existing software fully captures their visual and musical complexity. To address this, we created a workflow, combining tools for text and music annotation with synchronized markers.
Cross-Disciplinary Research: To address the challenges inherent to the lauda genre, our project fosters continuous, critical dialogue among musicologists, ethnomusicologists, philologists, digital humanists, and computer scientists. Epistemological approaches and practical strategies proposed by team members are collaboratively examined, refined, and implemented. This ensures that methods and insights developed in one discipline are rigorously tested and effectively applied across others. This approach integrates practical tasks and source analysis. Technical and humanistic perspectives also converge in the project. Paleographical and codicological studies of ancient lauda manuscripts and printed books reveal how these sources were meticulously designed to facilitate the transmission and use of laude. Consequently, we aim to integrate the contextual and intertextual richness of historical lauda sources into the LAUDARE relational database. This approach seeks to preserve the historical sources' modes of presenting connections and relationships, offering modern users an experience akin to that of lauda singers.
The cross-disciplinary approach extends even beyond the LAUDARE team. In May 2023, we established a permanent scientific panel to explore the relationship between music and poetry. Sharing this knowledge beyond the academic sphere will not only enhance future surveys in libraries and archives but also raise awareness among non-specialists about a genre of Italian poetry and music that was remarkably popular from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.
The systematic approach to the lauda repertory has also led to unexpected and undoubtedly more challenging surprises. From the approximately 250 sources previously known, the census we are conducting has now reached 1,400, each of which is being examined for texts accompanied, directly or indirectly, by melodic references. This will require a significantly greater effort in terms of data entry.