The Library of Voices - Unlocking the Alamire Foundation’s Music Heritage Resources Collection through Visual and Sound Technology (LIBARY OF VOICES)

In September 2018, the Library of Voices will open in the St. Norbert’s Gate building on the Park Abbey site in Leuven, to complement the House of Polyphony. The Library of Voices will be a high-tech, innovative and interdisciplinary platform from which the KU Leuven and the Alamire Foundation will implement digital images, develop their unique collection with the Alamire Digital Lab (ADL), digitally disseminate the collection through the Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM), and valorize it in sound and image with its state-of-the- art polyphonic Sound Lab. This fully equipped Data Research Centre will be a unique research tool for polyphony. The Library of Voices will be the nerve-centre of this project, where the musical source can be studied using the latest technology, where it can be audio-visually analyzed, and where—in a completely new approach—the acoustic circumstances in which the composition was created centuries ago can be reconstructed and studied. This step both broadens and deepens the operations of the Musicology Research Unit and its partners ESAT and LIBIS. The Sound Lab will be a unique, innovative facility the like of which exists nowhere in the world.