[MEI-L] Lost Voices Project is Live!

[Richard Freedman]

Dear MEI colleagues,



I am pleased to announce the public launch of the "all MEI" *Lost Voices
Project* at http://digitalduchemin.org!  The site is freely available to
anyone interested in Renaissance music—scholars, teachers, performers, and
anyone curious about the humanities in the digital domain.



As you might recall, the *Lost Voices Project* centers on 16 sets of music
books published by Nicolas Du Chemin in Paris in the years around 1550,
offering facsimiles and modern editions of almost 400 chansons by composers
like Clément Janequin, Claude Goudimel, Etienne Du Tertre, and many others.
You can read the complete poem of each piece (with rhyme diagram), scroll
through the piece, or listen to the music in high-quality sampled versions
(lute in mean-tone tuning).  Help <http://digitalduchemin.org/help/> menus
explain how to use the many features of our site.



The *Lost Voices Project *also opens these chansons to some novel modes of
collaborative inquiry. We have built a large database of analytic
observations about the music (with some 11,000 entries). You can search,
sort, and save your queries <http://digitalduchemin.org/search/>. With a
free individual account you can collect ‘favorite’ pieces, take private
notes on them, and participate in live public discussions about them. (The
‘help’ menus explain how to request an account, or how to reset your
password if you already have one).



Meanwhile we have created new kinds of dynamic digital editions using the
open-source Music Encoding Initiative standard. Here you can view variants
and emendations  <http://digitalduchemin.org/piece/DC0221/>(with critical
reports for each piece), as well as display any phrase or analytic segment
instantly in any modern internet browser (no special software is needed).



You can also take part in our collaborative exploration of the “lost
voices”:  reconstructions of the contratenor and bassus parts of dozens of
pieces from the last five volumes of our corpus. You cancompare different
solutions  <http://digitalduchemin.org/piece/DC1208/>(just as you can
compare variant readings for the complete works). If you like, you can also
contact us to submit a reconstruction of your own.



The project is described in more detail in the attached document, and will
be explained in an essay in *Early Music* that will appear in a few
weeks.  You can also learn more through our Editor’s Forum blog (see the
attachment for a link).



I am very grateful to the many colleagues and students
<http://digitalduchemin.org/about/participants/> who have made all of this
possible, and especially to my partners at the CESR in Tours (led by the
incomparable Philippe Vendrix) for their patience, enthusiasm and vision.



Finally, I owe a deep debt to the various funding agencies whose generous
support make all of this possible: the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the), the CNRS, the
CESR, and Haverford College.



I will be in touch with further news about the project, and a new grant
that will sustain a related collaborative for another three years.



With best wishes,





Richard Freedman






-- 
Richard Freedman
John C. Whitehead Professor of Music
Haverford College
Haverford, PA 19041

610-896-1007
610-896-4902 (fax)

http://www.haverford.edu/faculty/rfreedma
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