Possible approaches to deciphering Russian ancient Znamenny chant

Abstract

In this article we provide approaches to translating into modern music notation Znamenny Russian Church chants, written in neumatic (“znamenny” or “hook”) notation. Neumes are sequences of notes of varying lengths, that correspond to singing one syllable of old Slavonic verse. Starting in 17th century, neumes were supplemented with pomjeta facilitating mapping into modern music notation. Manuscripts from earlier periods have no pomjeta and are thus not readable today. This paper introduces computer-based approaches to the reconstruction of znamenny notation without pomjeta into modern music notation. These approaches are trained on dvojyeznamenniks but can be applied to manuscripts without pomjeta.