Welcome to Polifonia

Playing the soundtrack of our history

From the soundscape of Italian historical bells, to the influence of French operas on traditional Dutch music, European cultural heritage hides a goldmine of unknown encounters, influences and practices that can transport us to experience the past, understand the music we love, and imagine the soundtrack of our future. Polifonia will organise this journey by using ten pilot use cases as drivers, addressing preservation, management, study, and interaction with musical heritage.


Polifonia makes this happen by building novel ways of inspecting, representing, and interacting with digital content.


Memory institutions, scholars, and citizens will be able to navigate, explore, and discover multiple perspectives and stories about European Musical Heritage.

Outputs

BELLS KG

Bells’ Knowledge Graph

Discover More →

Pitchcontext

A Python Module for Melodic Analysis using Weighted Pitch Context Vectors.

Discover More →

ORGANS KG

The ORGANS Knowledge Graph

Discover More →

TUNES KG

The TUNES Knowledge Graph

Discover More →

MOZ

Muziekopnamen Zendgemachtigden (Dutch Broadcast Concert Collection)

Discover More →

MELODY

Make me a Linked Open Data story

Discover More →

Polifonia Knowledge Extractor

The Polifonia Knowledge Extractor is software that allows the extraction of knowledge from text.

Discover More →

MusicBO Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph about the role of Bologna in the European musical landscape.

Discover More →

Harmory Knowledge Graph

The Harmonic Memory Knowledge Graph

Discover More →

Roman Chord APIs

APIs for the Roman Chord Knowledge Ontology

Discover More →

Music Meta ontology

An ontology to describe music metadata

Discover More →

Annotation of the Polifonia Corpus

Data, annotation and interrogation of the Polifonia Corpus.

Discover More →

Polifonia Lexicon

A multilingual lexicon about music.

Discover More →

MEETUPS Ontology

The MEETUPS Ontology module for MEETUPS PILOT

Discover More →

MEETUPS KG

The MEETUPS knowledge graph

Discover More →

FACETS

A search-engine to explore collections of scores.

Discover More →

Bellspilot

Explore italian cultural soundscapes through the historical bells heritage

Discover More →

SPARQL Anything

SPARQL Anything is a system for Semantic Web re-engineering that allows users to … query anything with SPARQL

Discover More →

Tonalities

An Online Collaborative Annotation Interface for Music Analysis.

Discover More →

Polifonia Corpus

Online text analysis tool for linguistic interrogation of Polifonia’s multilingual diachronic corpus.

Discover More →

musoW

The catalogue of music data on the web

Discover More →

CLEF

A Linked Open Data native system for Crowdsourcing

Discover More →

LHARP

Local Harmonic Agreement based on Recurrent Patterns

Discover More →

Project Timeline

Jan. 2024 – Polifonia ecosystem maturity level 3 (citizens)

Final release of Polifonia software packages and documentation. Project products are ready for reuse by developers and scholars and for supporting promotion to the wider public.

Mar. 2023 – Polifonia ecosystem maturity level 2 (scholars)

Second release of Polifonia software packages and documentation. Polifonia digital artistic installation released. Project products are ready for reuse by developers and scholars.

May 2024 – Project end

Apr. 2022 – Polifonia ecosystem maturity level 1 (devs)

First release of Polifonia software packages and documentation. Project products are ready for reuse by developers. Stakeholder network created.

Jun. 2021 – Project iterative live cycle kicked-off

Call for stakeholder network is out. Pilots started. Ecosystem publishing infrastructure configured and ready to use.

Jan. 21st, 2021 – Project Kick-off

Polifonia is a 3M€ project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme. It will run until April 2024.

Pilots

The history of pipe organs is rich and diverse, and highly interrelated to economic, religious and artistic contexts. Currently, the information about building practices and characteristics of ~2000 Dutch…

Bell structures are widespread both in urban and rural areas. They contribute to the distinctive shape of a landscape, defining its soundscape and playing as markers of daily, festive and ritual times.…

In order to answer research questions, musical heritage scholars need to combine diverse datasets ranging from music scores, audiovisual material to metadata. They need to identify similar entities…

Music libraries currently lacks well-founded information retrieval tools. While it is relatively easy to find music based on metadata, content-based music retrieval still remains as a challenge. The Facets…

Tonalities is developing tools for the modal-tonal identification, exploration, and classification of monophonic and polyphonic notated music from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. This pilot has…

The digital music collection of the Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam) includes thousands of melodies from Dutch popular culture, spanning a period of more than five centuries. To trace possible international…

In 2006 Bologna was declared by Unesco “City of Music”. Despite this, the extraordinary musical heritage of this city is kept in cultural institutions and archives, studied by a few specialized scholars…

This pilot will build a knowledge graph of the historical experience of music in childhood, using life writing (letters, diaries, memoirs, travel writing) and other historical texts as sources for adult…

This pilot focuses on supporting music historians and teachers by providing a Web tool that enables the exploration and visualisation of encounters between people in the musical world in Europe from c.1800…

Pilot summary  The ACCESS Pilot will develop new ways to enhance participation and engagement in music:  for the general public; for those with hearing impairments; and for those with physical disabilities.…

Recent News

The sensory journey “Data Wanderings” is a new project of Polifonia. The art installation will open on Friday, Oct. 13, in Bologna, Italy and you can visit it until the 28th of the month.

The sensory journey “Data Wanderings” is a new project of Polifonia. The art installation will open…

12 October 2023

Make sure to check out a sensory experience called Data Wanderings from this Friday (Oct. 13) in Salaborsa, Bologna. The art installation is a Polifonia project, built by Umanesimo Artificiale and based on sources from our project.

Make sure to check out a sensory experience called Data Wanderings from this Friday (Oct. 13) in Salaborsa,…

9 October 2023

Polifonia is known for its strong links with academia and is pleased to present some highlights in its involvement in research and associated conferences.

Polifonia is known for its strong links with academia and is pleased to present some highlights in its…

29 February 2024

In 2024, Paul Mulholland, Naomi Barker and Paul Warren (The Open University, U.K) are continuing their experiment investigating how different kinds of music influence the appreciation of an artwork; and to what extent the same kind of sense-making processes are used when viewing artwork and when listening to music. To do this, the researchers are looking for more participants. They have now automated the process so that participants can complete the experiment online without the involvement of an experimenter.

Music instrument with music notes on white background illustration In 2024, Paul Mulholland, Naomi…

17 January 2024

During the last project meeting, the Polifonia consortium extensively discussed how to foster the impact of the project in academia and beyond. How to make the output of Polifonia sustainable after the lifetime of the project is one important aspect. But fostering re-usability does not end by long-term preservation of certain assets (such as data and tools). In Polifonia Research Ecosystem – Impact of a project. A webinar on Data re-use and workflows, we will discuss how we ensure that more fluid assets such as interfaces, but also experiences in setting up and executing workflows via those interfaces, become reproducible and reuseable.

During the last project meeting, the Polifonia consortium extensively discussed how to foster the impact…

15 January 2024

For the Polifonia project, the Central Institute for Cataloging and Documentation (ICCD) of the Italian Ministry of Culture is carrying out activities on the historical bell heritage. The ICCD has also initiated a process of documentation of the practices and knowledge associated with bell production through collaboration with historical Italian foundries.

The bell casting process performed by the Pontifical Marinelli Foundry. Photo courtesy of ICC For…

9 January 2024

One of the tools Polifonia will release is MELODY. It stands for ‘Make mE a Linked Open Data StorY’ and is a place where you can make sense of Linked Open Data and publish text-based as well as visual data stories. Earlier this year, students of the University of Bologna explored data through this tool. Let’s see what they have found and learned about… rock music.

One of the tools Polifonia will release is MELODY. It stands for ‘Make mE a Linked Open Data StorY’…

13 December 2023

Music libraries currently lack well-founded information retrieval tools. While it is relatively easy to find music based on metadata, content-based music retrieval still remains as a challenge. The Polifonia FACETS pilot aims to tackle this challenge by building a faceted search engine (FSE) for large collections of music documents.

Music libraries currently lack well-founded information retrieval tools. While it is relatively easy…

24 November 2023

This is a week of major importance to the Polifonia team, as its researchers join both the conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) and the conference for the International Semantic Web and Linked Data Community (ISWC): venues of significant importance for both research and industry. Read more about Polifonia’s contributions below.

This is a week of major importance to the Polifonia team, as its researchers join the conference of…

7 November 2023

On Oct, 13 an explorative workshop took place in a school in Milton Keynes (UK) as part of the Polifonia project. The “Music Meets Machines workshop” gave a look into cutting-edge technologies used to represent music history.

On Oct, 13 an explorative workshop took place in a school in Milton Keynes (UK) as part of the Polifonia…

3 November 2023

Partners

Newsletter

Stay updated with latest calls, project results & activities, programme news & events.
Sign up for our newsletter.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 101004746