Introduction
As well as archiving sources for the future, part of the work of the DIAMM project is to attempt to restore and retrieve lost works using the already sophisticated and still developing technology available through digital photography.
Click on an image to see animated restoration process of the whole page. The animations are necessarily large, and so will load slowly even with an ethernet connection. As they open in separate windows, it is possible to view other web pages while the images are downloading
Very few pre-reformation British music manuscripts survive in even semi-complete form. Most are damaged and fragmentary, and have been preserved only because they were re-used as binding material or for other purposes: this music went out of fashion quite fast (a testimony to the vitality of the tradition few manuscripts contained music more than 30 or 40 years old) and when obsolete many manuscripts were consigned to the book-binder's waste-box (or, in one case, for use as backing for some ceiling paintings at New College, Oxford). Medieval vandalism was compounded by the more wilful destruction at the Reformation and again in later centuries when books were re-bound and the early bindings containing the music fragments simply discarded. This practice was common up to the mid/late 19th century; there is a notable difference in fragment survival rates between libraries that rebound extensively in the 19th century and those that did not.
Several samples of Virtual Restoration have been reproduced on the Samples page showing the degree to which sources apparently damaged beyond retrieval can be manipulated sufficiently to return the text to a readable state. This is not an attempt to return them to a pristine condition, only to enhance the text sufficiently to make transcription or study of the music possible.