«Ao som da nossa melodia» A Contribution to the Singing of Renaissance Portuguese

It is almost taken for granted that a singer specialising in early music should be acquainted with at least the old variants of French and English, while for other languages more leeway is afforded. In the case study proposed in this article, the text of the song taken from the 16th century manuscript F-Peb Masson 56 is in Portuguese. Is information on pronunciation, possibly historical, accessible? What needs should an edition of this work meet and how can they be satisfied? This article, starting from a brief evaluation of the available literature on the editions of the songbook to which the piece belongs and on the pronunciation associated with 16th century Portuguese, addresses a problematic nature of representing sounds as text and proposes a possible methodology to address it.