Digital Landscape of Medieval Chant

A collection of resources and tools for exploring medieval monophonic chants. No claim to completeness; feel free to expand!

Databases with pitch notation and search function

• Cantus Database ^{1 2 3 4 5}
• Corpus Monodicum ^{6 7}
• GregoBase ^{8 9}
• Graduale/Antiphonale Synopticum. Based on Omnigreg
• ChantDigger ¹⁰

Digital Coropora

• CantusCorpus, derived from Cantus Database ^{8 11}
• GregoBaseCorpus, derived from GregoBase ^{8 11}
• Corpus Monodicum Data, derived from Corpus Monodicum
• Chantdigger Corpus

Optical Music Recognition

• OMMR4all ¹²
• Cantus Ultimus ¹³

Transcription Editors

• Neon.js, On Github
• Monodi+ – not published yet. Don't hesitate to contact me via mail (tim.eipert@uni-wuerzburg.de) for more information.
• CEAS¹⁴

Python Libraries

• Chant21 ⁸
• MonodiKit ¹⁵

Case Studies

• Cornelissen et al.: Chant Contour; Differentiae-Antiphon Transition ⁸
• Nakamura, Eipert, Moss: Historical Changes of Modes and their Substructure ¹⁶
• Lanz, Vojtěch; Hajič, Jan. 2023: Text boundaries do not provide a better segmentation of Gregorian antiphons. ¹⁷
• Hajic Jr, Jan, et al. "Towards Building a Phylogeny of Gregorian Chant Melodies." ISMIR. 2023.¹⁸
• Ballen, Gustavo A., Klara Hedvika Muhlova, and Jan Hajic Jr. "What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics." bioRxiv preprint 2024-08. ¹⁹

Literature

Footnotes

1. Lacoste, Debra, and Andrew Mitchell. "The cantus database: Progress report." Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 45.1-2 (2004): 119-130. ↩

2. Lacoste, Debra. "The cantus database: Mining for medieval chant traditions." Digital Medievalist 7 (2012). ↩

3. Helsen, Kate, and Debra Lacoste. "A report on the encoding of melodic incipits in the CANTUS database with the music font ‘Volpiano’." Plainsong & Medieval Music 20.1 (2011): 51-65. ↩

4. Lacoste, Debra. "The Cantus Database and Cantus Index Network." (2022). ↩

5. Shaw, Rebecca. "Differentiae in the cantus manuscript database: standardization and musicological application." Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology. 2018. ↩

6. Eipert, Tim, et al. "Editor support for digital editions of medieval monophonic music." Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Reading Music Systems. 2019. ↩

7. Tim Eipert, Andreas Haug, Felix Herrmann, Frank Puppe, Konstantin Voigt und Christoph Wick: Editionsphilologische, informationstechnische und musiktheoretische Aspekte des digitalen Edierens einstimmiger Musik des Mittelalters am Beispiel des CORPUS MONODICUM. In: Musiktheorie. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft. Heft 3/2019. ↩

8. Cornelissen, Bas, Willem Zuidema, and John Ashley Burgoyne. "Studying large plainchant corpora using chant21." 7th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology. 2020. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

9. Angel, Miguel, and Hernández Benavides. "Exploring the musicalization of texts in gregorian chant using data analytics." (2020). ↩

10. Haas, Max. Mündliche Überlieferung und altrömischer Choral: historische und analytische computergestützte Untersuchungen. Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften, 1997. ↩

11. Cornelissen, Bas, Willem H. Zuidema, and John Ashley Burgoyne. "Mode classification and natural units in plainchant." ISMIR. 2020. ↩ ↩²

12. Wick, Christoph, and Frank Puppe. "OMMR4all-a semiautomatic online editor for medieval music notations." 2nd International workshop on reading music systems. 2019. ↩

13. Helsen, Kate, et al. "Optical music recognition and manuscript chant sources." Early Music 42.4 (2014): 555-558. ↩

14. Hornby, Emma, Rebecca Maloy, and Paul Rouse. "Chant editing and analysis program: a tool for analyzing liturgical chant." Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 14.1 2022. (Link) ↩

15. Eipert, Tim, & Moss, Fabian C. "MonodiKit: A data model and toolkit for medieval monophonic chant." Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (pp. 67-71). 2023, November. (Link ↩

16. Nakamura, Eita; Eipert, Tim; Moss, Fabian C. "Historical changes of modes and their substructure modeled as pitch distributions in plainchant from the 1100s to the 1500s." Proc. 16th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR), pp. 450-461, (November 2023.) (Link) ↩

17. Lanz, Vojtěch; Hajič, Jan. 2023. "Text boundaries do not provide a better segmentation of Gregorian antiphons." Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 72–76. https://doi.org/10.1145/3625135.3625143 2023. ↩

18. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gustavo-Ballen/publication/378071124_Towards_building_a_phylogeny_of_Gregorian_chant_melodies/links/65c5302134bbff5ba7f583ea/Towards-building-a-phylogeny-of-Gregorian-chant-melodies.pdf ↩

19. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.19.608653v1.abstract ↩