timeipert/cantuscorpus

A corpus of plainchant for computational musicology, scraped from the Cantus database

CantusCorpus

The CantusCorpus is a corpus of plainchant intended for computational research. It is essentially a dump of the Cantus database. The database was scraped using its API, and converted to easy-to use CSV files. For many chants, transcriptions in the Volpiano format are included. These can be loaded into music21, a Python toolkit for computational musicology, using the library chant21.

Note: Even the latest version of the corpus will generally be out-dated, as the Cantus database is updated continuously. CantusCorpus is intended only for computational studies, where this is less of a problem. If you require up-to-date information, please do not use this corpus, but use Cantus directly.

> Download the latest release of the CantusCorpus

> Read more about the corpus

> Check out chant21 and the GregoBaseCorpus, a related plainchant corpus.

Citation

If you use this corpus in your research, please cite the Cantus Database as suggested on its website:

Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant -- Inventories of Chant Sources. Directed by Debra Lacoste (2011-), Terence Bailey (1997-2010), and Ruth Steiner (1987-1996). Web developer, Jan Koláček (2011-). Available from http://cantus.uwaterloo.ca/. [date accessed].

Further please cite the paper describing the CantusCorpus:

Forthcoming...

Versions

As Cantus is being updated continuously, we plan to occasionaly release new versions of the CantusCorpus as well. All of these will be versioned, can be downloaded from GitHub.

Licence

The CantusCorpus (the collection of .csv files) is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, just like the Cantus Database itself. The Python code used to generate the corpus (the code in the src/ directory) is released under an MIT license.

Generating the corpus

The CantusCorpus is created automatically after scraping the Cantus API. If you just want to use the corpus, you don't have to regenerate it yourself: simply download the latest release and you're good to go. But if you want to regenerate the corpus yourself, you can of course do so: read on....