The Library of Voices: Unlocking the Alamire Foundation’s Music Heritage Resources through Visual and Sound Technology

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Library of Voices © Image-zone

Acoustics
January 2019 - January 2023

In September 2018, the Library of Voices opened in the St. Norbert’s Gate building on the Park Abbey site in Leuven, to complement the House of Polyphony.

The Library of Voices is a high tech, innovative and interdisciplinary platform from which KU Leuven and the Alamire Foundation, with their partners ESAT and LIBIS, implement digital images, develop their unique image collection through the Alamire Digital Lab (ADL), digitally disseminate the collection through the Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM), and valorize it in sound and image with its state-of-the-art Alamire Sound Lab. This fully equipped Data Research Centre is a unique research tool for plainchant and polyphony.

In the Library of Voices, the musical source can be studied using the latest technology, can be analyzed audio-visually, and the acoustic circumstances in which the composition was created centuries ago can be reconstructed and studied in a completely new approach. The Alamire Sound Lab is a unique, innovative facility the like of which exists nowhere else.