Digital Approaches to Troubadour Song. Chapman, K. E. Ph.D. Thesis, Indiana University, 2020.
Digital Approaches to Troubadour Song [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   1 download  
The troubadours were poet-composers who flourished in Occitania (today southern France) and surrounding areas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their lyric poems survive in chansonniers (songbooks) which usually contain only the texts. A fraction of the melodies that accompanied these poems were written down; fewer than 350 melodies survive for a lyric corpus of over 2,600 songs which appear over 13,000 times in all extant sources. This dissertation is part of a larger project whose aim is twofold: to create an openaccess, electronic, searchable archive of these melodies and to apply computational methods of analysis to identify the musical characteristics of the melodies, find patterns and relationships, and track trends in style both over time and within the works of individual authors. In this study, I first illustrate the methodology I followed to assess and encode the corpus of troubadour melodies and give an overview of the types of tools used to analyze the encoded melodies. In the subsequent chapters, I present five case studies which investigate musical features of the repertory through computational and statistical approaches, where I confirm, revise, or expand on existing knowledge of the repertory. The first case study identifies the extent and features of Guiraut Riquier's melismatic writing by applying analytical techniques typically used to analyze textual corpora. The second case study applies a different technique borrowed from computational linguistics, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), to track the similarity of melodies with versions extant in multiple sources and to compare the phrases of melodies in one manuscript which have notation for more than one stanza. The three case studies in Chapter III adopt other analytical approaches to investigate and compare the pitch and interval content of the melodies. These studies help identify patterns in pitch organization in the entire repertory, point out stylistic trends of specific troubadours, and compare selected musical features by source. Overall, this study demonstrates the possibilities of computational approaches to contribute to existing scholarship on this repertory. Furthermore, the digital archive created for this project aims to empower additional research on the music of the troubadours, including the study of corpus-wide characteristics, the analysis of stylistic traits in specific authors or sources, and changes in style over the course of the tradition.
@PhDThesis{        chapman2020-digital,
    author       = {Chapman, Katie Elizabeth},
    year         = {2020},
    title        = {Digital Approaches to Troubadour Song},
    abstract     = {The troubadours were poet-composers who flourished in
                   Occitania (today southern France) and surrounding areas
                   during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their lyric
                   poems survive in chansonniers (songbooks) which usually
                   contain only the texts. A fraction of the melodies that
                   accompanied these poems were written down; fewer than 350
                   melodies survive for a lyric corpus of over 2,600 songs
                   which appear over 13,000 times in all extant sources. This
                   dissertation is part of a larger project whose aim is
                   twofold: to create an openaccess, electronic, searchable
                   archive of these melodies and to apply computational
                   methods of analysis to identify the musical
                   characteristics of the melodies, find patterns and
                   relationships, and track trends in style both over time
                   and within the works of individual authors. In this study,
                   I first illustrate the methodology I followed to assess
                   and encode the corpus of troubadour melodies and give an
                   overview of the types of tools used to analyze the encoded
                   melodies. In the subsequent chapters, I present five case
                   studies which investigate musical features of the
                   repertory through computational and statistical
                   approaches, where I confirm, revise, or expand on existing
                   knowledge of the repertory. The first case study
                   identifies the extent and features of Guiraut Riquier's
                   melismatic writing by applying analytical techniques
                   typically used to analyze textual corpora. The second case
                   study applies a different technique borrowed from
                   computational linguistics, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA),
                   to track the similarity of melodies with versions extant
                   in multiple sources and to compare the phrases of melodies
                   in one manuscript which have notation for more than one
                   stanza. The three case studies in Chapter III adopt other
                   analytical approaches to investigate and compare the pitch
                   and interval content of the melodies. These studies help
                   identify patterns in pitch organization in the entire
                   repertory, point out stylistic trends of specific
                   troubadours, and compare selected musical features by
                   source. Overall, this study demonstrates the possibilities
                   of computational approaches to contribute to existing
                   scholarship on this repertory. Furthermore, the digital
                   archive created for this project aims to empower
                   additional research on the music of the troubadours,
                   including the study of corpus-wide characteristics, the
                   analysis of stylistic traits in specific authors or
                   sources, and changes in style over the course of the
                   tradition.},
    keywords     = {computational musicology,digital
                   musicology,musicology,troubadours},
    mendeley-tags= {musicology},
    school       = {Indiana University},
    type         = {Ph.D. Dissertation},
    url          = {https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/25114}
}

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