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

ECHOES is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Portuguese ‘Fundação para Ciência e Tecnologia’, it was ranked first in the 2022 Portuguese national call for research projects in the ‘Arts’ group! ECHOES runs from 03/2023-02/2026 (36 months); the total awarded funding is 249.506,19 €. ECHOES pursues a deeper understanding of an early chant repertory from medieval and early modern Portugal (up to the 17th cent.). While the main research questions are musicological, this project involves a large component of information technologies related to the development and application of techniques such as OMR (Optical Music Recognition) and MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) to early music scores. ECHOES will combine these technologies in new ways to make available to scholars and music aficionados a chant repertory that was part of the cultural identity of the region of Braga for centuries. 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.