Giving Voice to Hispanic Chant through a Phylogenetic Study of Medieval Plainchant

Introduction

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.

Historical Context

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.

Challenges of Hispanic Musical Notation

As a consequence, the Hispanic musical notation is considered indecipherable and its thousands of melodies still remain silent.

Project Goals

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:

1. Bioinformatics
2. Genetics
3. Computational analysis
4. Aural architecture
5. Virtual restoration of sound and images

Along with tools from the humanities, including musical performance.

Innovative Approach

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.

Cultural Impact

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.