Augmented Vocality: Reimagining Old Irish Poetry for Contemporary Classical Music

Augmented Vocality: Recomposing the Sounds of Early Irish and Old Norse was a cross-disciplinary artistic research project, funded by the AHRC, that ran from 2020 to 2023. The project’s key aim was to reengage with the sonic qualities of early medieval texts from two significant corpora: Early Irish and Old Norse. By combining linguistic and literary scholarship, analysis, audio processing, and musical composition, the project sought to develop new methodologies for cross-disciplinary artistic research. Between 2020 and 2023, Augmented Vocality resulted in a number outputs, including: audio databases of texts, words, and phonemes in reconstructed Old Norse and Old and Middle Irish pronunciation; audio processing tools; and musical compositions for singers, live electronics, and ensembles. During the AHRC-funded phase of Augmented Vocality, the project team, comprising researchers from the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (University of Cambridge) and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, sought to develop methodologies for creative engagement with the reconstructed sounds of Early Irish and Old Norse. Rather than trying to recreate a version of historically-informed performance, we felt that working with native speakers of the project’s descendent modern languages (Irish and Icelandic), combined with contemporary music and technology, would enable us to re-present the performative qualities of early texts in a twenty-first century context. We intended to develop a framework for cross-disciplinary research that could be repurposed and adapted for other artistic research projects involving ancient, endangered, or minority languages. Since 2023, our research has focused on how we might apply the project’s databases and tools to different performance contexts, with a greater emphasis on composer-performer collaboration. To explore these areas, this paper draws on a work-in-progress for guitar, audio archive material (a recorded poem in Old Irish) as a case study.