Advanced Play

What Advanced Play is

On a chant page, the main transport is deliberately simple: Play, a progress bar, and a download button. Advanced Play is an extra drawer beside it for singers, directors, and learners who want to control the playback.

There are four controls:

• Speed — how fast it plays.
• Pitch — how high or low it sits.
• Tone — what the guide sound is like.
• Style — which interpretive tradition shapes the rhythm.

Each control below is explained twice: in plain terms (what you hear and when to use it) and technically (what the code does).

Speed

How fast the chant plays.

In plain terms

Slower is easier to follow and sing while you are learning; faster is closer to a confident, flowing pace. Speed never changes the pitch — a slow playback is the same notes, just stretched out.

Technically

The value is a multiplier applied to every note length and gap after the chant is parsed, so it scales the timeline only and leaves frequencies untouched. It is clamped to a 50%–140% range.

Pitch

How high or low the chant is sung.

In plain terms

One knob for "put this in a range I can actually sing." Chant has no fixed concert pitch, so this just moves the whole melody up or down as a unit — the tune and all its intervals stay identical. Use Auto unless it sits too high or too low, then nudge it.

Technically

• Auto places the mode's final near a standard register, then octave-normalizes so the median note sits in a singable octave.
• Final: X computes the nearest semitone offset from the mode's final to the requested pitch class.
• Octave Lower / Octave Higher add a −12 / +12 semitone shift on top of that normalization.

Every option transposes all notes by the same amount, so intervals are always preserved.

Tone

The synthesized sound used for playback.

In plain terms

This is a guide voice to sing with, not a recording of a choir. Every option is a clear, steady, singable pitch — there are deliberately no bells, plucks, or "ensemble" sounds, because you cannot follow those. The options differ only in how plain or warm the sound is. A little reverb is added to all of them so it feels like it is in a room.

Technically

• Pure Tone — a single sine oscillator.
• Warm — a fuller additive harmonic series, gently low-passed.
• Vox — the same kind of source shaped by two parallel formant band-pass filters (a subtle "oh" vowel), mixed with dry signal so it stays smooth rather than nasal.
• Choir (sampled) — live playback through a SoundFont (Florestan Ahh Choir, CC0) via the browser synthesizer; timing matches the guide tones.

Sampled voice attribution: Florestan Ahh Choir SoundFont (CC0). Guide tones share a master-bus convolution reverb (about 12% wet), applied identically to live playback and WAV export. Tone changes timbre only — never pitch or rhythm.

Style

The interpretive tradition used to shape note lengths and phrasing.

In plain terms

Chant has more than one legitimate way to be sung, and scholars and choirs genuinely disagree. This picks which tradition the playback imitates. These are real interpretations, not a "beginner mode" — to practise, choose a real style and slow the Speed down. All three read the same marks written in the chant; they just treat them differently.

What each style does to the marks

• Solesmes — equal base beat; mora dots roughly double; the episema lightly broadens; the note before a division lengthens (more into stronger bars); the note before a quilisma broadens while the quilisma itself stays light and quick.
• Equalist — mora and episema do not lengthen (they are Solesmes additions to the Vatican edition); liquescents stay light; no quilisma anticipation. Phrase endings still settle — the classic mora ultimae vocis: the last note broadens at the half and full bars and comes fully to rest at the double bar.
• Mensural — discrete long/short values: mora, episema, and the note before a quilisma become full long notes (~2×), while quilisma and liquescents are short, over a quicker base pulse so the contrast is obvious. Descending currentes (the diamond notes of a climacus) stay on the quick base pulse.

Technically

Each style is a profile of multipliers applied to an ordinary note. The bars below are drawn to scale, so you can see how long each mark is sung in each style relative to a plain note (the grey reference bar at the top).

Multipliers are relative to an ordinary note. The ordinary note itself is slightly faster in some styles (base length Solesmes 0.42s, Equalist 0.40s, Mensural 0.34s), which sets the overall pulse on top of these ratios.

Dynamics follow the style too

Loudness shaping (and the glow that mirrors it) is drawn from each school's own account of where expression lives, not just its note lengths:

• Solesmes — the full arsis & thesis arch: each incise rises to its summit and relaxes to the cadence; mora and episema notes soften into repose.
• Equalist — expression flows from the words: the line stays closer to even, the Latin accent carries more of the lift, and phrase endings settle. The Solesmes signs are ignored for loudness exactly as they are for length.
• Mensural — duration is the expression: loudness stays nearly even and the long notes carry their own natural (agogic) weight — a slight lean, the opposite of the Solesmes repose softening.

Defaults & saving

Your choices are remembered in the browser and reused the next time you open a chant. Changing any control reloads the playback before the next Play, so what you hear always matches the current settings.

Next steps

• Open a chant — find Advanced Play next to the Play button and try each control.
• Arsis & Thesis — the rhythm theory behind the Solesmes style.
• Reading Square Notation — the marks (mora, episema, quilisma) that Style interprets.