Today@Dal

Posted March 24 by Global News:

A Dalhousie professor is part of a team working on research that could transform the study of music.

Jennifer Bain, chair of the music department at Dalhousie, is working with other musicologists and computer scientists to develop computer software to analyze medieval music.

The project is called the optical neume recognition project.

In the late 10th century, musical notations that denoted notes, pitch and rhythm were often written about lyrics in neumes.

As music notation developed, composers diverged from this model and used a five-line musical staff.

The researchers are developing software that can read the neumes, and Bain’s contribution involved creating a legend of the neumes that the software could recognize.

“When we want to analyze [music], we’re trying to figure out which pieces of music are similar, which are different, how do they fit with the text, are there similarities between different kinds of pieces of music from different parts of the year?” Bain said.

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