Towards a generative model of medieval chant

Abstract

For some time now, musicologists studying pre-modern Europe have been examining the question of regional and contextual influences on vocal melodies. However, previous computational approaches to medieval melodies often focus on isolated features, like modality, or rely on purely descriptive statistics. While descriptive analyses can identify associations between variables, they cannot explain the underlying mechanisms by which these melodies were formed and transmitted. Here, we present initial steps towards developing a generative model for pitch sequences in monophonic medieval chants as functions of both musical and contextual parameters, learnable from data. Our main contribution is a model that simultaneously integrates multiple metadata covariates. Instead of providing a purely descriptive analysis or focusing solely on mode, we aim to model the data-generating process itself.

Fabian C. Moss

Digital Music Philology and Music Theory

Fabian C. Moss is an assistant professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU), Germany.