(c) 2015 by
Alexander Schindler, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Website: http://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~schindler
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Slychief
The intention behind Task 2.4.1 Linking Music to Scores pilot was to evaluate the applicability of state-of-the-art score-following technologies to content provided by Europeana partner organizations and its integration within the Europeana technical infrastructure.
The task was approached through a prototypical implementation of a score-following system. First, necessary components were identified. Second, available open-source components were investigated. Based on this a Python based prototypical implementation of an audio-to-score alignment system was created, which output was used to create HTML5 based interfaces to visualize the calculated alignment. This score-following Web interface was used to demonstrate and evaluate the objectives and obstacles of the chosen approach.
Europeana Sounds is Europeana’s ‘missing’ fifth domain aggregator, joining APEX (Archives), EUscreen (television), the Europeana film Gateway (film) and TEL (libraries). It will increase the opportunities for access to and creative re-use of Europeana’s audio and audio-related content and will build a sustainable best practice network of stakeholders in the content value chain to aggregate, enrich and share a critical mass of audio that meets the needs of public audiences, the creative industries (notably publishers) and researchers. The consortium of 24 partners will:
- Double the number of audio items accessible through Europeana to over 1 million and improve geographical and thematic coverage by aggregating items with widespread popular appeal such as contemporary and classical music, traditional and folk music, the natural world, oral memory and languages and dialects.
- Add meaningful contextual knowledge and medium-specific metadata to 2 million items in Europeana’s audio and audio-related collections, developing techniques for cross-media and cross-collection linking.
- Develop and validate audience specific sound channels and a distributed crowd-sourcing infrastructure for end-users that will improve Europeana’s search facility, navigation and user experience. These can then be used for other communities and other media.
- Engage music publishers and rights holders in efforts to make more material accessible online through Europeana by resolving domain constraints and lack of access to commercially unviable (i.e. out-of-commerce) content.
These outcomes will be achieved through a network of leading sound archives working with specialists in audiovisual technology, rights issues, and software development. The network will expand to include other data-providers and mainstream distribution platforms (Historypin, Spotify, SoundCloud) to ensure the widest possible availability of their content.
For more information, visit http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-sounds and http://www.europeanasounds.eu