Digital methods for research on complex ways of transmission between regionality and universality in music of the Middle Ages.

Abstract

During the Carolingian Renaissance the singing of chant like writing and the text of the Bible was subject to the efforts of unambigousness and unanimity. The cantilena romana as the way of singing chant in Rome suppressed other singing traditions and was altered at the same time to what is called Gregorian chant. The chant manuscripts from the earliest witnesses written in adiastematic neumes to later sources written on lines on the one hand show a great uniformity on the other hand reveal numerous differences. The transmission of chant is characterized by this ambivalence between ideal continuity and actual variance. Digital methods of research can help to investigate this phenomenon more deeply than possible with traditional methods. Encoding of a large amount of chant, visualizations and advanced techniques of data analysis and data mining can offer new answers to the urging questions of the transmission of chant.