Kate Helsen
Office: TC 227
Email: kate.helsen@uwo.ca
Before teaching at Western, Kate Helsen held a two-year post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the University of Toronto, researching the transition between neumes and square notation in the 12th and 13th centuries. Her doctoral research, at the University of Regensburg, Germany, focused on the structure and transmission of the Great Responsory repertory in the Gregorian tradition. Her publications may be found in journals such as Plainsong and Medieval Music, Acta Musicologica, the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, SPECTRUM, and Early Music. She has been a researcher with CANTUS since 2004, The Becket Project (University of Toronto) since 2008, and has contributed transcriptions to the Internet-based Irish project, The Liturgical Veneration of Irish Saints in Medieval Europe (2009). She was a team member of the Musical Exchanges 1100 - 1650 project at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM) University of Lisbon from 2009 to 2013. Her current SSHRC-funded research explores how the Digital Humanities landscape connects to medieval musicology, both with her Optical Neume Recognition project, in which document analysis software is applied to thousand-year-old musical manuscripts, and her Melodic Construction and Evolution project, applying computer analytics to thousands of chant melodies as strings of data. She also sings professionally with the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir in Toronto, which specializes in Baroque performance practice.
