Chant SoundWalk

When: Sunday 05 July - Thursday 09 July
Where: Outdoor Space, Stage@Leeds
Open to: All Welcome
Price: Free of Charge

We are delighted to host our first ever SoundWalk for IMC 2026! Anna de Bakker, Debra Lacoste, and Jennifer Bain from the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) have organised a free Chant SoundWalk. In the SoundWalk, posters of fragmented chant manuscripts are placed around campus, and participants may download the DACT app on their phones in order to hear the chant presented as they approach the poster as detected through an iBeacon or GPS location. (Click 'yes' for updates within the app after downloading.) The posters will be in the green space behind Stage@leeds/LUU, with the first one located just over the bridge from Old Bar, but you can also follow the chant walk by finding the locations on the app itself as well.

DACT is a partnership project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). It aims to extend the study of the dissemination of plainchant from localised research focussed mostly on Europe and the Middle Ages to global research tracing transmission to other continents through to the modern era. Understanding how chant travelled and adapted over time and place through oral and written traditions is important for what it can tell us about the communication of culture through the encounters of people and ideas. However, data management when dealing with a thousand years of music is a major obstacle. To address this problem, DACT is mobilising a large network of people and projects to analyse chant repertories digitally and to develop new computational resources in tandem with existing chant databases and digital repositories of manuscripts.