Recycled music: quotation and similarity in Renaissance composition

I'll discuss my ongoing work with data from "Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass Project" (CRIM). This project provides a large digital corpus focused on Renaissance Imitation Masses -- polyphonic choral pieces composed in deliberate imitation of, and variation on, previously existing works. These compositions contain many recurring sequences of musical intervals; longer sequences may be recognizable to the listener as motifs or "soggetti," while shorter sequences can reflect the character of a composition or voice part in a more granular way. The piece's overall sound depends not only on the specific sequences that are used, but on the patterns of their use and reuse. We'll look at some different ways to measure these behaviors, and to use them to characterize voice lines or compositions -- which can in turn provide insight on similarities and dissimilarities across different pieces, including those known to be in musical relationship with one another.