Project description
Innovative methods to recover mediaeval Hispanic liturgy sounds
Plainchant, the sacred Christian chant, represents the oldest Western corpus in musical notation. Prior to the Gregorian liturgy, distinct liturgical families developed their own chant repertoires. Manuscripts dating from 700 to 1300 documented the Hispanic liturgy in both text and music. However, the sources of the liturgy only offer information regarding the ceremonies and texts, rendering their melodies unplayable and indecipherable. The ERC-funded RESOUND project aims to resurrect the sounds of Hispanic chant. This combines tools from bioinformatics, genetics, computational analysis, virtual restoration of sound and images, aural architecture, and the humanities, including musical performance. The overall aim is to gain fresh insights into the generative and evolutionary dynamics of European plainchant repertoires.
Objective
Plainchant, the sacred Christian chant, is the most ancient Western corpus preserved in musical notation. Before the unifying adoption of the Gregorian liturgy throughout Europe in the 9th century, a number of liturgical families –each one with its own chant repertoire– emerged in the ancient Western Roman provinces. Among them, the Hispanic liturgy was recorded –text and music– in manuscripts between ca. 700 and ca. 1300. These sources allow us to know the liturgy’s ceremonies and texts, but not the melodies themselves. In fact, notational signs do not indicate the specific intervals between the notes, since they were written prior to the use of a notational system in which each individual sign contains precise pitch information. As a consequence, the Hispanic musical notation is considered indecipherable and its thousands of melodies still remain silent.
RESOUND aims to achieve what has so far been considered an impossible task: bringing to life the sounds of Hispanic chant. To accomplish this goal, we will use tools from the fields of bioinformatics, genetics, computational analysis, aural architecture and virtual restoration of sound and images, along with tools from the humanities, including musical performance. Computational analysis aside, these tools have never been used in the study of medieval chant, let alone in combination. By recovering the sounds of Hispanic chant and establishing these innovative methods, we will be able to offer new understandings of the generative and evolutionary dynamics of the European plainchant repertoires. In this way, we will not only recuperate the Hispanic melodies, but also restore a significant part of the soundscape of medieval Europe. Thus, by reversing the standard approach via focusing on a territory considered peripheral, we will shed new light on the process of cultural creation in the European Middle Ages.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
28040 Madrid
Spain