From Page to Place: Reviving Forgotten Hymns through AI in a Site-Specific Heritage Music Project

This paper documents a site-specific heritage music project that revived three hymns from The Home Hymn Book (1885) for the 170th anniversary of Foster Hill Road Cemetery in Bedford, England. Drawing on the cemetery’s rich musical and civic history, the project aimed to reanimate forgotten local repertoire through a blend of live vocal recordings and AI-generated choral textures.

Central to the process was ai-choir, a free, open-source tool developed by Ralf Popescu, which implements the So-VITS-SVC deep learning framework for singing voice conversion. The resulting performances were designed to emulate the heterophonic, reverberant sound of a Victorian church congregation and were presented within the cemetery’s restored Gothic chapel using its audiovisual system.

The project highlights the creative potential of AI in heritage music con-texts, particularly where resource limitations preclude live ensemble performance. It also raises important ethical questions about the role of AI in community music-making, especially in relation to amateur participation and the social value of local musical engagement. While the AI-generated voices introduced artefacts and limitations, careful mixing and spatialisation techniques helped produce convincing and evocative results.

The project demonstrates how AI tools can support the rediscovery and reinterpretation of place-based musical traditions, offering new ways to connect communities with their cultural past. It also suggests avenues for further research in choral acoustics, psychoacoustics, and the aesthetics of AI-mediated performance. The final recordings are available at: https://youtu.be/tZr3mHwlMr4.