This AHRC-funded project was directed by Prof Thomas Schmidt, who joined The University of Manchester in 2012.
The project was a collaboration between the University of Manchester, the Warburg Institute (School of Advanced Study, London), Bangor University, and the Department of Digital Humanities (King's College, London).
The project explored the visual interaction of musical notation, verbal text and decorative devices on the written or printed page in musical sources around 1500, and how musicians and other readers would have reacted to those sources as a result.
One of the project's key contributions was an online resource for the scholarly community, with an innovative interactive database detailing aspects of the text, notation and other visual symbols that constitute the mise-en-page of all extant manuscripts and prints of polyphonic music from this time, as well as a series of case studies of selected sources.
Other project outcomes included a collection of essays and studies, and a double issue of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation presenting the papers of the project conference; also, the project team worked with the Dutch ensemble Cappella Pratensis (which specialises in the singing from reproductions of original sources) to give workshops and performances based on the new research at the Laus Polyphonie festival in 2014.