The Canadian Chant Database (CCD) will serve as a repository for the collection and cataloguing of chant manuscripts, fragments, printed books, and audio recordings that exist in Canada. It will potentially include, in addition to manuscripts brought over from Europe, books or manuscripts containing chant that were copied or printed in regions now known as Canada or intended for use in this area, in particular those translated into Indigenous languages.

Redevelopment of the Cantus Index will maintain and expand the fully-searchable central hub for existing digital chant repositories, including Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant and more than a dozen smaller databases representing a heritage of liturgical chant in such places as the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovakia, and Spain. The redeveloped Cantus Index will include high-resolution image streaming via IIIF and full-text input using optical music recognition (OMR) technology, and will be designed to facilitate the connection with other chant databases through technologies such as APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Linked Open Data.

Debra Lacoste, Project Manager | Jan Koláček, Project founder and developer

Cantus Index is a catalogue of chant texts and melodies for the Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases are connected through this site, where texts and melodies from all networked databases can be searched at once.

Debra Lacoste, Project Manager | Web Development by the Distributed Digital Music Archives & Libraries Lab, McGill University | Jennifer Bain, Principal Investigator |

Cantus is a database of the Latin chants found in manuscripts and early printed books, primarily from medieval Europe. This searchable digital archive holds inventories of antiphoners and breviaries—the main sources for the music sung in the Latin liturgical Offices—as well as graduals and other sources for music of the Mass. New phases of the project include adding chant melodies to existing records, and indexing other types of chant manuscripts, including processionals, pontificals, and sources that contain sequences.

Research Team: Jennifer Bain | Inga Behrendt | Julie Cumming | Ichiro Fujinaga | Andrew Hankinson | Kate Helsen | Alessandra Ignesti | Jan Koláček | Debra Lacoste | Sarah Ann Long | Elsa De Luca | Alan Sexton | Barbara Swanson

The main objective of the research for the Cantus Ultimus project was to incorporate the latest optical music recognition (OMR) technologies with plainchant manuscripts in order to transform the existing Cantus Database into a state-of-the-art research environment in which both music and text are fully searchable. The experiments undertaken during the Cantus Ultimus grant will be realized in a revitalized Cantus Database and redeveloped Cantus Index 2.0.

Rebecca Shaw, Project Director

The Differentiae Database provides basic analytic tools for the cross-manuscript study of differentiae and a standardized means for identifying differentiae in manuscript indices. To date, the database includes differentiae from over 170 manuscripts, most of which are fully indexed in the Cantus Database. The database began as a standardization project for the differentia field in the Cantus Database, and the online Differentiae Database was created as part of Rebecca Shaw's master's thesis, completed at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (June 2019).