Chant21 & chant corpora
Chant21 is a Python library for working with plainchant in Music21. This is released in tandem with two chant corpora: CantusCorpus and GregoBaseCorpus.
- collaborators
- John Ashley Burgoyne & Jelle Zuidema
This project develops chant21, a Python package that improves support for plainchant formats Volpiano and gabc in music21. Together with the software, we release two corpora: CantusCorpus with chants in Volpiano format and GregoBaseCorpus in gabc. In the paper, presented at International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, we furthermore present two case studies.
The first case study shows that melodic contours of phrases in the GregoBaseCorpus are on average arch shaped, confirming the so-called melodic arch hypothesis. The second case study addresses a particular problem in chant scholarship: the connection between differentiae at the end of psalms, and the opening of the repeated antiphon. Our analyses of the CantusCorpus suggest that this relation differs across modes, and is fairly predictable, but not as predictable as the differentiae themselves. chant21 is a python library improves the support for plainchant in music21.
Cornelissen, B., Zuidema, W., & Burgoyne, J. A. (2020). Studying Large Plainchant Corpora Using chant21. 7th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3424911.3425514
📖 DLfM Paper • local copy
You can also find this work in chapter 2 of my PhD dissertation.