SCRIBEMUS

SCRIBEMUS. Scribes of Musical Cultures. Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe (ca. 900-1100) is a five-year project funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Coordinated by the University of Pavia in partnership with the University of Bristol, the project investigates the origins and spread of musical notation in Latin Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries, addressing one of the most significant developments in the history of Western music.

Bringing together musicology, Latin palaeography, linguistics, cognitive science, digital humanities and computational methods, SCRIBEMUS explores how medieval scribes developed increasingly sophisticated ways of representing, reading and transmitting musical sound. The project examines hundreds of surviving manuscripts, combining traditional scholarship with multispectral imaging and digital processing to recover texts and melodies that are no longer visible to the naked eye.

By reconstructing the networks through which musical knowledge circulated across monasteries, scriptoria and religious communities, SCRIBEMUS provides new insights into the history of European musical culture and the emergence of the notational systems that still underpin Western music today.