Chant Discography

A relational database of Western Plainchant on sound recordings, created by Fr. Jerome Weber.
Transferred to the Sacred Music program at the University of Notre Dame, managed by Peter Jeffery (Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies, Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology).

Rebuilt as a fully static site (HTML + CSS + JavaScript + JSON) from the original PHP/MySQL codebase, hostable on GitHub Pages with no server required.

What's here

Path	Purpose
index.html	Main SPA — handles all page routing and search
chant-index.html	Alphabetical index of all 7,200+ unique chant titles
record-index.html	Alphabetical index of all 2,918 records
performer-index.html	Alphabetical index of all 995 performers
data/records.json	All record data (converted from MySQL dump)
data/chants.json	All chant data (~38,500 entries)
content/	Static content pages (Home, Background, Abbreviations, etc.)
css/style.css	Original visual design, preserved
img/	Original images
scripts/	One-time data conversion scripts (Python)
chant/	Legacy PHP source files (kept for reference)

Hosting on GitHub Pages

1. Push this repo to GitHub
2. Go to Settings → Pages
3. Set source to Deploy from a branch, branch main, folder / (root)
4. The site will be live at https://<org>.github.io/<repo>/

To use a custom domain (e.g. chantdiscography.com):

• Add a CNAME file at the repo root containing your domain name
• Point your DNS A records to GitHub Pages IPs (see GitHub docs)

Regenerating the data

If the SQL dump is updated, re-run from the repo root:

python3 scripts/sql_to_json.py

This overwrites data/records.json and data/chants.json.

To regenerate content pages (Home, Background, etc.) from the legacy .txt files:

python3 scripts/txt_to_html.py

How search works

All search is client-side — no server needed.

• Records: matches query words against record_title, issue_number, performers, director, solo, keywords
• Chants: matches query words against title_of_chant and page (edition page references)
• Performers: filters records where performers, director, or solo contain the query
• Diacritics are normalised (searching "solesmes" also matches "Solesmes")
• Results cap at 500 chants to keep rendering fast; narrow the query for more precision

Contact form

The contact form uses mailto: — clicking Submit opens the user's email client with the message pre-filled. No server or third-party form service required.