Ollie Cargill’s MCA Project: Medieval Music

Week 8: Music as Sound

The three tracks I have selected are from the album Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Early Medieval Music) available from: Archive.org. I selected the tracks titled Hec Dies (3-voice Organum), Aucun - Lonc Tans - Annuntiantes (de Cruce) and Monophonic Dances: Danse Royale; Danse Royale; English Dance. I thought it would be interesting to see how an organum would look in SonicVisualiser compared to a monophonic piece, hence why I have selected these two specifically. Aucun was selected because it features both voice and instrument, whereas the others feature solely instruments or solely voice. I thought it would be interesting to pick three varied pieces.

Feature	Value
Title	Hec Dies (3-voice Organum)
Artist	Steven Crockett, Robert Heinrickson, Roger Weiss
Composer	Leonin (unconfirmed)
Copyright Info	℗ 1975 Southern Illinois University Press
Genre	Early Medieval, a cappella
Source	archive.org
File/Audio Format	mp3 (originally an LP)
Number of Channels	2
Sample Rate	48000Hz
Bits per Second	171kbps
Duration	00:30

Feature	Value
Title	Aucun - Lonc Tans - Annuntiantes (de Cruce)
Artist	Robert Heinrickson, Howard M. Brown, David Eisenbud
Composer	Petrus de Cruce
Copyright Info	℗ 1975 Southern Illinois University Press
Genre	Early Medieval, song
Source	archive.org
File/Audio Format	mp3 (originally an LP)
Number of Channels	2
Sample Rate	48000Hz
Bits per Second	174kbps
Duration	00:30

Feature	Value
Title	Monophonic Dances: Danse Royale; Danse Royale; English Dance
Artist	Howard M. Brown, Benjamin Choi, Laurence Libin, Anne MacWilliams, Michael Shapiro, Helen Walker
Composer	Unknown
Copyright Info	℗ 1975 Southern Illinois University Press
Genre	Early Medieval, Instrumental, Dance
Source	archive.org
File/Audio Format	mp3 (originally an LP)
Number of Channels	2
Sample Rate	48000Hz
Bits per Second	174kbps
Duration	00:30

One advantage of a time-frequency analysis over a waveform-based analysis is that time-frequency analyses are easier to read and thus gather information from. They are more comprehensible than waveforms, which tend to be difficult to extract information from at a glance, as they are extremely information dense. From an initial look at a waveform, one might only be able to determine how loud the audio is at certain points from the height of the waves, and how this changes throughout the song. However, a spectrogram can provide more information on pitch for example. If we look at the example from Monophonic Dances we can see from the waveform that there is repetition in the song, as a pattern can be seen in the waves. However, anything beyond the fact that there is a pattern and the dynamics is unknown from looking at the waveform. If we look at the spectrogram, this pattern is visable like in the waveform, but the Y-axis tells us the frequency, and therefore we can determine the relevant pitch. So from a time-frequency analysis we can work out melody and perhaps the key of the piece, giving us more information than a waveform.