Source: European Union 2
Across Europe, monasteries, churches and libraries house huge collections of medieval music that have never been fully explored. Most of the original documents have either fallen apart, disappeared completely or live in hard-to-access monastic libraries. REPERTORIUM developed AI-powered tools capable of identifying, cataloguing and analysing music buried within these archives, and created digital versions that make the manuscripts searchable.
Led by the Linares Higher Polytechnic School at the University of Jaén, Spain, REPERTORIUM brought together partners from eight countries to combine their expertise in musicology, AI and audio technologies.
Exploring Europe’s musical past
Most of the project’s work centred on a collection housed at Solesmes Abbey in France. In the late 19th century, Benedictine monks travelled across Europe photographing medieval manuscripts, creating what would become one of the world’s largest collections of liturgical music, containing an estimated 2 million melodies.
Analysing a collection of this size by hand would take decades, but REPERTORIUM had just three years. “The archive is an incredibly rich treasure,” says Julio José Carabias Orti, REPERTORIUM’s technical coordinator. “But much of this material had never been made accessible. Pieces were scattered or fragile, meaning countless melodies were essentially invisible.”
Teams of musicologists and medieval music specialists manually annotated thousands of examples, creating the training material needed for AI tools to learn. Once it was up to speed, the software could identify melodies, compare them with existing databases and help researchers navigate the collection quickly and efficiently.
“What the technology allowed us to do was create exact searchable digital versions of the scores,” adds Carabias.
As a result, the project was able to create an online repository containing more than 350 000 digitised images and 156 000 indexed chants, putting centuries of musical history at researchers’ fingertips.
Back on centre stage
One of the project’s highlights took place at Salamanca Cathedral, where a selection of the rediscovered Gregorian chants was performed live in concert. It’s thought that some of these melodies have not been heard in almost 1 000 years. For Carabias, moments such as this captured what the project was about. “European music is something we should be proud of,” he notes. “Bringing back to life things that have been lost for many years has a technical side, but also a romantic one.”
The project also contributed to the revival of a lost 18th century opera, supported the release of an album of Gregorian chants, and helped provide open access to the Solesmes archive through workshops that – for the very first time – welcomed a group of female researchers into the cloistered section of the monastery to visit the library.
The project attracted international press attention and was covered by major outlets such as BBC Music Magazine in the United Kingdom, El País in Spain, O Globo in Brazil, Austria’s Der Standard, and Italy’s Il Giornale.
Immersive experiences with 6D audio
REPERTORIUM wasn’t only about rediscovering music from the past. Using AI sound processing, the team developed immersive audio technologies that allow listeners to move through music as if they were physically inside it. REPERTORIUM’s six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) technology also allows listeners to change position, focus on a particular instrument and hear the music differently as they move through the virtual space.
“If you move towards the violin section, you hear the violins getting closer. If you move away, they recede,” says Carabias. “It is much closer to the experience of being in a real concert hall.”
The technology was showcased during a series of immersive classical music experiences with the Philharmonia in London and the Brandenburg State Orchestra Frankfurt (Oder), and culminated in Vilnius with the Lithuanian Philharmonic Orchestra.
“Usually when people think about artificial intelligence, they think about generative AI,” remarks Carabias. “But we used AI tools to understand our own history and culture.”
For REPERTORIUM, that meant using technology not just to preserve Europe’s musical heritage, but to help people experience it in a new way. Next steps involve expanding access to the tools online, and exploring further immersive experiences, allowing even more people to interact with Europe’s rich musical past.