MELISMA — write a line of chant, and hear it sung

Scriptorium · A Chant Machine

One syllable, carried across many notes — that is a melisma. This page is an antiphoner that answers back: set square neumes on the four-line staff, choose a mode, and press Sing. Four synthesized voices, tuned in pure fifths, will carry your line down a stone nave that has never existed.

I · The Antiphoner

Write your line upon the staff

Click to place the chosen neume; click a neume on its own pitch to strike it out. On a keyboard: arrows move the quill, Enter places, Delete removes, 1–5 choose the neume. The red bracket at the left is the mode's ambitus — the compass your melody must keep. The gold lozenge marks the tenor; the red ring, the final.

Mode

Words

Acoustic

Drone

Breath

Neume

Nothing here is a recording. Each voice is an oscillator passed through four band-pass filters shaped like a throat; the reverberation is convolution with a composed impulse response. First sound may take a breath — the nave has to be built.

II · The Four Modes

Eight tones were counted; four are offered

Medieval theory sorted all chant into eight modes. The machine gives you the four authentic ones. Each has a final where phrases come to rest, a tenor it recites upon, and an ambitus it may not leave.

Dorian

Final D · Tenor A

Grave, even-tempered, the workhorse of the repertory — the Dies irae walks in it. Rises a full octave above its final and settles back where it began.

Phrygian

Final E · Tenor C

The semitone hanging just above the final gives it an unresolved, keening colour. Ninth-century theorists heard severity; you may hear something older.

Lydian

Final F · Tenor C

Bright to the point of sweetness. Its raised fourth rang so sharp that singers quietly flattened it whenever the cantor looked away.

Mixolydian

Final G · Tenor D

Open, declarative, a preacher's tone — a major scale that never quite behaves like one, its seventh always a step lower than you expect.

III · A Grammar of Neumes

One neume, one syllable's worth of melody

Single squares mark single notes. The compound shapes are the melismas — the voice moving while the words hold still. The machine sings compound neumes slurred, gliding between pitches on a single vowel, exactly as a choir would.

Punctum“a point”One square, one note, one pulse.

Virga“a rod”A single note wearing a tail; scribes favoured it for higher pitches.

Podatus“a foot”Two notes climbing. Read it from the bottom up.

Clivis“a slope”Two notes falling, the voice stepping down.

Torculus“a little twist”Three notes, up and back — a turn of the voice on one vowel.

IV · The Nave & the Tuning

Stone is the fifth voice of the ensemble

The nave

Nothing you hear was recorded. The reverberation is an impulse response composed from shaped noise — a breath of early reflections, then a long dark tail, low-passed the way limestone swallows treble — convolved with the choir in real time.

The side chapel holds your voice for under two seconds. The great nave holds it closer to four, and hands each phrase back a beat after you finish it. Sing something sparse and listen to what the building does with the silences.

The tuning

The choir sings in Pythagorean intonation: every interval stacked from pure, untempered fifths, as the theorists of the ninth century insisted. Fifths and octaves lock perfectly; thirds carry a medieval fierceness no piano can make.

Each singer is only a filter bank — four band-pass filters shaped like a throat, saying ah, eh, oo — with a slow vibrato, a slower drift, and eight cents of honest disagreement between the voices. That disagreement is the ensemble.