The LAUDARE team joins SHARPER – European Researchers’ Night in L’Aquila to present its new web platform.

As already known, the lauda is the vernacular devotional song that marked the birth of singing in Italian, spreading from the thirteenth century onwards. What survives of it is scattered across libraries and archives in Italy and abroad, in manuscripts that are hard to consult and harder still to compare with one another.

The aim of the LAUDARE platform is to bring that material back together. Manuscript images, transcriptions, musical notation, critical annotations and metadata are held in a single database and shown side by side, so the source and the scholarly reading of it stay visible at the same time: you can follow a melody in the original notation while reading the text beneath it and the annotations produced during digitisation. Fuzzy search handles the spelling variants that make medieval vernacular texts so difficult to query, and filters by source, region, century and other metadata let the repertoire be explored even without knowing in advance what to look for. A dedicated comparison tool arranges several witnesses of the same lauda next to each other — work that once meant travelling between libraries — making it possible to see at a glance how a text and its tune changed as they moved across the peninsula.

More details will follow soon!

Come and follow a lauda from manuscript to notation, and ask us how it was built. Free, and no musical or historical background needed.

Here the Programme