Volpiano is a font that was created for the transcription of chant melodies. It was developed by Fabian Weber at the University of Regensburg under the direction of David Hiley.

With Volpiano, alphanumeric characters and other symbols are rendered as pitches and other musical elements on standard staves. On Cantus Ultimus, you can use Volpiano to enter a certain melody and search for that melody in available manuscripts.

Volpiano Dictionary

Queries can be entered using the characters below.

In Volpiano, a hyphen ("-") is used to separate pitches, with additional hyphens increasing the separation between pitches.

No separation occurs between pitches in the same neume. One hyphen ("-") separates neumes. Two hyphens ("--") separate neumes associated with different syllables. Three hyphens ("---") separate neumes associated with different words.

Features of Volpiano Search

1. There are two types of Volpiano search in Cantus Ultimus: "Volpiano" and "Volpiano (Literal)." "Volpiano" matches a sequence of pitches, regardless of how those pitches are grouped into neumes, syllables, and words. "Volpiano (Literal)" matches the pitches in the query and the way those pitches are grouped. For example, the two queries below will return the same results in a "Volpiano" search, but different subsets of those results in a "Volpiano (Literal)" search. In a "Volpiano (Literal)" search, the first query will only return chants in which the sequence of four pitches shown occurs in a single neume, while the second will only return chants where the pitches occur in two separate consecutive neumes.
   1---fgfh---33

   1---fg-fh---
   Note that in these queries, chants may be returned where the pitches do not make up a complete neume. For example, a "Volpiano (Literal)" search of the second query above could return a chant that includes:
   1---efg-fhgf---
2. Volpiano search is not octave dependent. For example, this query will return a chant with a sequence of the pitches F and G in any octave.
   1---fg---
   Similarly, this query will return a chant with a sequence of pitches E and D in any octave.
   1---el---
3. Liquescents are shown as smaller noteheads in Volpiano results. For the purposes of search, however, liquescents are treated like regular (non-liquescent) notes. For example, searching the string
   1---gf---
   will also return any chant that includes
   1---gF---
4. Accidentals are encoded according to their position in the manuscript, and therefore might not immediately precede the note they affect. As with pitches, the octave of the accidental does not affect the search results.