Linked music data project 'Polifonia' completed: discover new tools to explore European Musical Heritage

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Marloes Bontje

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May 23, 2024, 4:30:57 AMMay 23
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Linked music data project 'Polifonia' completed: discover new tools to explore European Musical Heritage 

The project team is excited to present the results of the Horizon2020 project Polifonia - a project on the intersection of heritage studies, musicology, music information retrieval and semantic web technologies. The consortium, consisting of 10 partners (University of Bologna, Open University, King's College London, University of Galway, Ministero della Cultura, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Digital Paths and Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) launches the music discoverability platform ‘Polifonia Web Portal’. In addition, the researchers and developers have also unlocked and linked other music data, developed tools and software that will help musicologists take steps forward in their research on European musical heritage.

Polifonia_WebPortal_LandingPage.png

Launch Polifonia Web Portal
The Web Portal serves as the primary entry point to Europe’s extensive musical heritage. It gathers diverse musical resources and data, from historical data to melodic patterns, and allows both general users and experts to perform research across sources. The User eXperience of the portal is designed to favor ‘serendipitous discoveries’, rather than offering pre-determined paths. The Polifonia Web Portal is a massive step towards seamless access, interconnected narratives, and boundless exploration of music heritage. Before Polifonia, our musical heritage was fragmented, scattered across disjointed datasets, available via limited search capabilities. Now, the Polifonia Web Portal changes this situation for good.

More tools
This is by no means all that this four-year project has yielded; research and development within the work packages and its 10 pilots also included the release of open source software, datasets and ontologies, such as: 
1. Patterns Interface: a tool designed to allow exploration of European Traditional Music through a selection of search types, interactive network visualisations, tables and audio.   
2. Tonalities Interface: an online collaborative annotation Interface for music analysis
3. musoW: a catalogue of musical resources available on the web realized with the idea to support teachers in music education, creative industries, historians, and musicologists in finding what they need.
4. Music Meta: a rich and flexible semantic model to describe music metadata related to artists, compositions, performances, recordings, broadcasts, and links.
5. Chord Corpus (ChoCo): ChoCo provides 20K+ timed chord annotations of scores and tracks, that were integrated, standardised, and semantically enriched from a number of repositories and databases.
+ many more tools. 
All components developed within this project can be used in conjunction, as well as in isolation. These open source components can be found in the ‘Polifonia Ecosystem’  an environment supported via GitHub

Research
The work packages also undertook the necessary research and published papers in search of solutions to semantic web challenges or issues within the music information retrieval field. Polifonia researchers won Best Research Paper Award at Extended Semantic Web Conference edition 2023 and published in Scientific Data (vol 10), part of the Nature Portfolio. All papers can be found through Zenodo.

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