The project referenceFunded by the €3 million Horizon Europe programme, it is proposed to use artificial intelligence (AI) to bring to life 4,000 Gregorian hymns composed between the 9th and 11th centuries, which have not been heard in the past thousand years.
Coordinated by the Spanish University of Jaen, through its Research Group on Signal Processing in Communication Systems, and reference It brings together academic institutions, orchestras and industrial partners from eight countries – Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, Finland and Lithuania – and aims to analyze some 400,000 photographic negatives of Gregorian chants, performed at the end of the 19th century by Benedictine monks from the Abbey of Solsum in France.
A liturgical hymn belonging to the Catholic Church, Gregorian chant dates back to early Christianity, but underwent a profound recovery and revision in the nineteenth century, at the initiative of the Abbot of Solsmes, Prosper Geiranger, who promoted the study and rescue of ancient musical manuscripts kept in the institution, founded at the beginning of the eleventh century.
Guéranger died in 1875, and a few years later, with the development of photographic techniques, the monks of Solesmes, who had become a true European center of this type of sacred music, began photographing old volumes of Gregorian chant coming from monasteries and other religious institutions across the continent.
He was equipped with a paleontological laboratory to study his private collection, the convent, which was reported by the Spanish newspaper Country, estimating that the 400,000 negatives include about two million Gregorian chants. This vast archive is the project reference It will now analyze and combine AI solutions with other technologies that allow visual recognition of musical notes and retrieve musical information in multiple datasets.
The next step would be to compare these two million pieces with what has already been recorded in the archives of Gregorian chant to determine which of them actually correspond to the missing pieces.
Gregorian Spotify
Principal researcher on the project referenceJulio José Carabías Orte, Head Professor of Communications Engineering at the Escola Politécnica Superior de Linares, part of the University of Jaén, points out that the fact that they are manuscripts from different periods presents an additional difficulty, and narrates Country that it was necessary to manually catalog about 127,000 hymns to “teach” the AI that was being used.
The expectation of the monks of Solesmes is, in the end, that referencewhich is expected to last for three years, brings back to liturgical life about four thousand hymns that had no copies and had not been heard for many centuries.
After Solesmes, the reference – an acronym for the broad English nomenclature “Searching and Encouraging the Publication of the European Repertory by Techniques Operating on Instruments of Use Associated with Records” – he intends to study other archives, and his task is not limited to the rescue of lost compositions. Within the scope of the project, tools are created that, for example, make different musical instruments independent in recordings, and concerts are planned to perform some salvaged pieces of music live.
Karabias Orte explains that 2,200 hours of Gregorian chant are scheduled to be recorded at the Monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Le Barrot, in France, where a concert will also take place at the end of 2025.
The parallel program will also include conferences, workshops and editing of various publications, and all the pieces of the rediscovered Gregorian chant will be integrated into the Neumz application, which the Spanish researcher described to Country “Sort of Spotify for AD”.
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