Stylometry and Automatic Attribution of Medieval Liturgical Monodies

While automatic attribution of literary text as well as stylometry evaluation are nowadays wellestablished research areas, much less has been done in the field of musicology. Here we present the results of the implementation of an automatic stylometric attribution technique to a corpus of liturgical monodies of medieval origin (the so-called Gregorian Chant, Old Roman Chant and Ambrosian Chant). The ‘unidimensional’ nature of the musical repertoires investigated (rhythmfree melody without accompaniment) allows the adoption of a known method based on a pseudodistance between frequency-vectors of n-gram of consecutive symbols. Finally, we show that some specific features of musicological interest inside the three liturgical families can be naturally extracted using a statistical analysis of n-gram distributions. The results presented show that a quantitative approach is well suited to support and accompany the investigation of refined problems in musicology