Saltar para o conteúdo principal

FCCNFCT Digital Services

Access the national information on scientific and technological funding in Portugal

Activity Funded

Echoes from the Past: Unveiling a Lost Soundscape with Digital Analysis

Ecos do passado: Revelando uma paisagem sonora perdida por meio de análise digital

Reference
2022.01957.PTDC
Project Start Date
2023-03-01
Project End Date
2026-11-30
Principal Investigator
Coinvestigator
Scientific Area
Humanities
Funding Program
Concurso de Projetos de I&D em Todos os Domínios Científicos - 2022 - ICDT

Abstract

In our modern world, it is increasingly common in all areas of society to have machines performing tasks without human intervention. Access to information is mostly digital, information is dematerialized, it travels through fibre optic cables and it reaches us at our fingertips, on mobile phone screens and laptops. This research projects aims at bringing historical musicological research into the 21st century. It will push standard methodologies for research and open their barriers to fully exploit the most recent technologies for music encoding and automatic analysis. Nowadays musicologists still largely perform analytical tasks ‘by hand’, often on the basis of small samples consisting of exemplary works or groups of works with common characteristics or function or a presumed common origin. Encoded music can instead dramatically expand the possibility for musical analysis, allowing more sophisticated searches through large repertories that would otherwise be difficult to handle simultaneously. This results in less time-consuming analysis and in a deeper understanding of the music, its compositional process, style, and transmission across time and space. ECHOES’s team of researchers and consultants includes the most renowned international scholars working in the field of plainchant music and brings together the current top experts with an established track record in computational musicology applied to chant. ECHOES aims to fully understand the history and evolution of the plainchant tradition (aka ‘monophonic liturgical chant’) of Braga (in northern Portugal) from the 11th to the 17th century. Our ambition is to explore the creative and dynamic process of musical production and transmission using automatic digital analysis of musical scores that were written with two different styles of notation: Aquitanian neumatic notation (employed until the 15th century) and square notation. This will lead us to reconstruct the plainchant soundscape of the Braga region and understand how this music was transmitted and, sometimes, reshaped over the centuries. Music is a product of the culture of its time and the people who created, listened and performed it. ECHOES tackles music with a more ecological approach, by studying not just the musical scores but also exploring how music changed over time and why; hence, this project will advance knowledge in the area of medieval and early modern music, Iberian cultural identity and, ultimately, history of mentalities. Indeed the analysis of handwritten musical notations can reveal hidden and meaningful information about the people who prepared, edited, used and later changed these books. ECHOES will frame the contribution of the individuals who wrote the scores and explain how they contributed to the larger exchange of ideas. Ultimately, the aim of ECHOES is to trace networks of ideas and cultural models and to determine how they were shaped by the people who handled the music books, thus leaving a personal mark on the history of Iberian early music book culture. ECHOES also contributes to protecting this musical and cultural heritage and promoting its understanding and availability to a broader audience of musicologists, scholars, and music enthusiasts. ECHOES tackles the objective with a dual perspective: research line 1 (L1) on historical musicology and research line 2 (L2) on music technology. L1 aims to digitize, catalogue, describe and make freely available online on the PEM database all sources that can be ascribed to the region of Braga (this phase will build on previous research carried out by our team). L2 will focus on musical analysis and interpretation of data created by L1. L2 will create a prototype interface for musical analysis of plainchant that will initially perform automatic cross-referenced analysis of a selection of around 100 chants found in either books or fragments. The project’s prototype interface can eventually be scaled up to analyse the full repertory of Braga plainchant in future projects and even expanded to add further cross-comparison between plainchant sources written in other European music notation styles. By including 6 students and a post-doc fellow, ECHOES provides advanced training in such diverse areas as codicology and music palaeography, early music, critical editing, and computer-aided musical analysis. Such skills development is critical for the future of research. In short, ECHOES will be the first comprehensive analysis of this repertory and will establish its distinctive features, provide open access to all the sources and objects of analysis, and will establish new tools for research. In addition, it will provide critical training and development for a new generation of music scholars.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)

Funding 249.506,18 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

249.506,18 €