Musica Instrumentalis – MUSICONIS

1. Establishment of an indexation model using: organological, analogical and iconographical data for both performance and sound description.
2. Remote data recovery via webservices (using a new XML format designed from step 1)..
3. Building of a Latin, Occitan and Oïl lexicon on the vocal and instrumental performance, musical instruments and choreography (based on the indexation experience possible after step 2).

Establishment of a web consortium of medieval databases (Gothic Ivories Project, Instrumentarium of Chartres, Musicastallis, Scultures and Vitraux from the INHA, Initiale from the CNRS) oriented towards medieval musical performance, bi-monthly seminars (publication reports on a dedicated blog), creation of an indexation model.
Creation of a fully functional web portal: creation of an administration interface (backend) and a public part of the website (frontend); creation of a faceted search (Solr technology); trilingual organological indexation (cf. MIMO Online).

Launch of the portal in 2014, International Symposium on representation of sound, scientific diffusion, publications (including conference proceedings). Master's theses and Doctoral dissertations on topics related to the Musiconis project, or using the portal as a new tool for the description of images, performances, instruments, etc.

The first results of the Musiconis project were presented (directly or indirectly) in 9 conferences in France and abroad.
Since 2011, scholars have published 14 articles or book’s chapters on related subjects to the project Musiconis.
Three university works were supported in the Musiconis program: two doctoral theses and one Professor’s “HDR” dissertation.

The Patrimoines et Langages Musicaux research team from the University Paris-Sorbonne, in association with the Signes, formes et représentations research team of the Medieval Civilization Higher Studies Center (CESM) from the University of Poitiers, introduces a research project called Musica Instrumentalis, which includes 2 interconnected tasks:

1 - The constitution, from a selection of existing databases, of a meta-database of medieval musical scenes represented in images from various formats, and the development of technological tools for the online access of these images and the online exchange of shared data.
2 - The conceptualization of theoretical tools for establishing a new indexing model that incorporates the images’ audible data, and will serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary scientific research on the theme of the representation of the medieval soundscape.

This project will meet widespread expectations amongst those musicologists, music professionals and amateurs -- but also historians, art historians and literature experts -- who express an interest in images as a major source of documentation on the history and culture of medieval society (instrumentalists, singers, dancers, jugglers and minstrels, etc.).

The introduction of an interactive platform between multiple existing databases, which will create a single portal, aims to provide access to all the musical scenes indexed by the French researchers. This bilingual portal, associated with the International Directory of Musical Iconography, will offer an original iconographic indexation model that will take into account the visual parameters of the sound and provide a basis for a wider reflection on the sound in medieval iconography.

Technically, the project will start on an already established body of photographic evidence, as well as major national programs of digitalization, which will be gathered under the common indexation of musical figures (the most important being the IRHT Illumination database, the Stained Glass and Sculptures databases of the Centre André Chastel, the Roman database of the CESCM, the Stalla database at the University of Nijmegen, NL, and the Princeton Index of Christian Art).

The portal will also contain easily searchable, clear and organized information, general and specialized bibliographies and a trilingual organological glossary (modern French, Latin and Old French) articulated with images, instrumental reconstructions and performance videos.

The scientific research itself is organized around the notion of the soundscape of the image: in addition to the visualization of its utterance, its dissemination and its perception, the musical sound is visually evoked in many ways: through mathematical proportions, organological choice of materials or shapes and configuration of details that will specify the quality of the sound, but also through gestures combined in a specific area of the representation. Shapes and colours are also expertly coordinated to work in a meaningful way within the image and inside the support that contains them. In other words, the area of the image as well as its scope of registration - architectural, liturgical, literary, codicological - may be considered as soundscapes where the researcher needs to determine specific parameters and interactions.
Our common goal, which involves some fifty French and European researchers from various fields, concerns both the terms of iconographic indexing of the meta-database and the unifying theme of the visibility of the medieval musical sound. It will unfold over the four years of the ANR project, and will take place both in a fortnightly doctoral seminar at the University Paris-Sorbonne, regular thematic 1-day conferences and a final international colloquium that will close with the edition of a collective book on the subject of the medieval soundscape in musical iconography.