New Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Courtly Song

The Franco-Flemish polyphony preserved in the recently discovered Leuven Chansonnier belongs to European heritage that stands artistically at the same level as the Flemish Primitives' paintings. However, the performance of the music contained in the fifteenth-century manuscript is jeopardized by the more than five centuries that separate medieval composers and today's musicians. From the initial results of the research conducted to bridge this gap, it appears important to transcend the case of the Leuven Chansonnier and to integrate it into its broader musical, literary, and historical context through multidisciplinary research. At the same time, the the research that this entails pushes the limits of traditional analysis. The response to this situation lies in data production through innovative technology and AI-driven processes. The methodology developed for this purpose is expected to prove applicable in other domains of the humanities. Starting from the case of the Leuven Chansonnier, "New Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Courtly Song" addresses a multifaceted set of questions. Specifically, it involves (1) multidisciplinary research into the broader societal and cultural context within which the Leuven Chansonnier and the extensive corpus of sources related to it were produced and circulated; (2) innovative research into the architecture and acoustics of the spaces in which the source corpus in general, and the Leuven Chansonnier in particular, were performed; and the transposition of the resulting data and insights into a contemporary performance context; (3) the integration of the achieved results and their dissemination both through academic and practice-oriented research and via international, national, regional, and local valorization platforms that aim to provide an authentic heritage experience to a wide audience.

Keywords:akoestiek, auralisatie, datamining

Disciplines:Medieval literature, Musicology and ethnomusicology, Cultural history, Acoustics, noise and vibration engineering, Digital media