Temporal Networks of Contrafacta in the First Three Troubadour Generations

The scope of this research is that of revealing the interconnected nature of medieval Romance lyric by looking at musical imitations. In the Middle Ages, melodic imitation was an essential part of artistic creation as old melodies were constantly borrowed by new authors, a practice known as contrafaction. In this study, we propose to analyse the complex relations between medieval lyricists resulting from this practice using temporal networks. We construct networks by representing each author’s body of work as a single node and connecting a lyricist’ corpus to that of another lyricist via a directed link when the latter author borrowed a melody from the former. To each directed link, we associate the temporal information of when the imitation was composed. Such networks provide a convenient visualization tool to explore the dataset and its connections in an intuitive fashion and are available online at: https://medmus.warwick.ac.uk/networks. They also provide an analytical tool: we use the networks to show how ideas might have spread among lyricists along time-respecting paths, and obtain measures of the authors’ centrality and influence on the overall literary corpus. We compare the results obtained with the temporal networks with those obtained via more traditional centrality measures computed for corresponding static networks, and explain why the temporally informed measures may provide a more accurate depiction of authors’ influence.