Peter van Kranenburg

Date: 16:00 – 16:30, Thursday, 10.12.2020
Location: Teams ICS Colloquium

Title: Tracing Medieval Music With Language Modelling
Abstract: Studying the history of Medieval Music is challenging in many ways. Many sources have been lost, and those that have been preserved pose many questions. The prominent Medieval tradition that survived till the present day is Gregorian chant, be it with major discontinuities. Around the time of origin of Gregorian chant, the late eight century, several other musical and ritual traditions thrived on the European continent. In this talk, I show how computational language models can assist to investigate the relations between the remnants of these various traditions. In the second half of the talk, I will focus on the melodies of the Old Hispanic rite. Virtually all melodies have only been preserved in pitch-unreadable neumatic notation. By using one feature that is extractable from this notation, the number of notes per syllable, it appears to be possible to hypothesize relations of several specific Old Hispanic chants with other traditions. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the Old Hispanic chant should be considered a distinguishable tradition in comparison to the other traditions. This research exemplifies how abstract computational models can be employed and reinterpreted to reveal relevant patterns in empirical data.