But ‘survive’ is perhaps too strong a word, for the music of the past exists in a kind of half-life. Even if you understand how a notation works (and it took years of patient scholarly work to decode some of the notations used for early medieval music, while the interpretation of others remains contentious), there are aspects of the music about which the notation is silent. Medieval chant, for instance, survives in a variety of ‘neumatic’ notations, essentially consisting of symbols showing whether groups of notes go up, or down, or up a bit and then down, and so on (Fig. 16). But how fast are you meant to sing the music, and what sort of vocal production did the monks who sang it employ? Did they project their voices loudly, or sing softly, or nasally, or gutturally? With or without vibrato? The notation does not say and nobody knows.