The Library of Voices - Unlocking the Alamire Foundation’s Music Heritage Resources Collection through Visual and Sound Technology

In September 2018, the Library of Voices opened in the St Norbert’s Gate building on the Park Abbey site in Leuven, to complement the House of Polyphony. The Library of Voices is a high tech, innovative and interdisciplinary platform from which the KU Leuven and the Alamire Foundation, with their partners ESAT and LIBIS, implement digital images, develop their unique image collection through the Alamire Digital Lab (ADL), digitally disseminate the collection through the Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM), and valorise it in sound and image with its state-of-the-art polyphonic Sound Lab. This fully equipped Data Research Centre is a unique research tool for plainchant and polyphony. In the Library of Voices, the musical source can be studied using the latest technology, can be analysed audio-visually, and the acoustic circumstances in which the composition was created centuries ago can be reconstructed and studied in a completely new approach. The Alamire Sound Labs are a unique, innovative facility the like of which exists nowhere else.

Keywords:historically informed practice, acoustics, archaeo-acoustics, digital signal processing, auralisation

Disciplines:Audio and speech processing, Multimedia processing not elsewhere classified, Signal processing, Digital media, Interactive media, Mixed media, Sound, Music performance