Partner profile: The Music Computing Lab at OU and the ACCESS Pilot
Dr. Simon Holland founder and director of the Music Computing Lab at Open University introduces their fascinating work and the ACCESS Pilot
The Music Computing Lab at The Open University is a research lab focused on empowering musicians, illuminating musical activities, and modelling music perception and cognition. Our research draws on musicology, neuropsychology, ethnography, pervasive technology, wearables, haptics and machine learning. Our work is innovation-driven. For example, we have recently developed tools to foster creativity in expert drummers, a new graphical music programming language for non-musicians and new forms of nonlinear expressive interaction for digital musicians, among many other interesting projects. Since 2010, the lab has attracted external research funding totalling around £4.5 million, supervised seventeen PhD students to completion, hosted around twenty research interns, and published over 160 refereed articles.
Our research on wearable haptics and music has led to exciting collaborations with the major theatre and music events such as Stables Theatre and the Milton Keynes International Festival. We teamed up to find new ways to promote the inclusion of people with physical, learning and sensory disabilities, such as profound deafness, both as audiences and performers. Since 2014, our lab has started investigating medical applications of our research. In this framework, our haptic wearables that were designed for coordinating the limb movement of drummers became key tools for improving the mobility of people with stroke, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy and Huntington’s disease. In Polifonia, we are bringing our expertise and experience to the #ACCESS pilot. In this use-case, we co-design, develop and evaluate wearable haptic technology to enable people who are Deaf or hearing impaired to engage as audience members in live performances.
Photo by Stéphane Bernard on Unsplash
Recent News
Polifonia recently released results of 40 months of research and development at the intersection of musicology, semantic web technologies, AI and Music Information Retrieval. And the Polifonia Web Portal, which enhances the discoverability of European musical heritage with Linked Open Data and Knowledge Graphs, can now be explored.
Polifonia recently released results of 40 months of research and development at the intersection of…
With a strong base in academia, the Polifonia team looks forward to the conference season every year. One of the highlights is the Extended Semantic Web Conference. In this article, a brief review of our participation in this conference and update on our paper output.
With a strong base in academia, the Polifonia team looks forward to the conference season every year.…
From the beginning of the project, Podiumkunst.net and Polifonia have been in close contact and looked to each other as role models. Our stakeholder Podiumkunst.net reflects on this synergy with a positive outlook. Remco de Boer and Monique in het Veld on the importance of the collaboration and the impact.
From the beginning of the project, Podiumkunst.net and Polifonia have been in close contact and looked…
TONALITIES, IReMus’ pilot for musical heritage data project Polifonia, develops tools for the modal-tonal identification, exploration and classification of monophonic and polyphonic notated music from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Now, the tools are available for use within the TONALITIES Interface for music analysis. Additionally, a patent was recently acquired for this collaborative interface by the IReMus lab.
TONALITIES, IReMus' pilot for musical heritage data project Polifonia, develops tools for the modal-tonal…
From April 8 to May 6 Polifonia organised their own version of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Polifonia Song Contest: musicians of all levels were challenged to create the ‘soundtrack of our history’ by using samples from the rich collections in the Polifonia project. Today we can announce the winning song.
From April 8 to May 6 Polifonia organised their own version of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Polifonia…
After four years of development work, the Polifonia project team is excited to present the results. The consortium, consisting of 10 partners from Italy, the Netherlands, France, England and Ireland 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.
After four years of development work, the Polifonia project team is excited to present the results.…
The Polifonia project formally ended on April 30, which means that the tools and software developed within this 4-year-project are released and ready for use. Today we look at ‘Patterns UI’.
The Polifonia project formally ended on April 30, which means that the tools and software developed…
Polifonia Song Contest is two weeks in, and will continue for another two weeks. Have you downloaded the sample pack yet?
With two weeks to go until the deadline, the "Polifonia Song Contest" beckons all musicians who find…
Are you the type of musician that is inspired by old sounds, such as cheerful Irish folk melodies, the majestic resonance of pipe organ concerts, and the timeless chimes echoing from century-old Italian bell towers? Then ‘Polifonia Song Contest’ is your challenge!
Are you the type of musician that is inspired by old sounds, such as cheerful Irish folk melodies, the…
The consortium is preparing for the last face-to-face consortium meeting of the Polifonia project in April 2024.
The consortium is preparing for the last face-to-face consortium meeting of the Polifonia project in…
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 101004746