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

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Pitchcontext

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

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ORGANS KG

The ORGANS Knowledge Graph

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TUNES KG

The TUNES Knowledge Graph

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MOZ

Muziekopnamen Zendgemachtigden (Dutch Broadcast Concert Collection)

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MELODY

Make me a Linked Open Data story

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Polifonia Knowledge Extractor

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

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MusicBO Knowledge Graph

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

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Harmory Knowledge Graph

The Harmonic Memory Knowledge Graph

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Roman Chord APIs

APIs for the Roman Chord Knowledge Ontology

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Music Meta ontology

An ontology to describe music metadata

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Annotation of the Polifonia Corpus

Data, annotation and interrogation of the Polifonia Corpus.

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Polifonia Lexicon

A multilingual lexicon about music.

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MEETUPS Ontology

The MEETUPS Ontology module for MEETUPS PILOT

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MEETUPS KG

The MEETUPS knowledge graph

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FACETS

A search-engine to explore collections of scores.

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Bellspilot

Explore italian cultural soundscapes through the historical bells heritage

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SPARQL Anything

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

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Tonalities

An Online Collaborative Annotation Interface for Music Analysis.

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Polifonia Corpus

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

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musoW

The catalogue of music data on the web

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CLEF

A Linked Open Data native system for Crowdsourcing

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LHARP

Local Harmonic Agreement based on Recurrent Patterns

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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 hybrid stakeholder workshop of 20th September was a success: Polifonia met with nearly all of its 30 stakeholders and found new collaborations over the work packages and pilots. The remainder of the week was dedicated to Polifonia’s 5th plenary project meeting including an advisory board meeting and a hackathon to further explore the possibilities of the project.

The hybrid stakeholder workshop of 20th September was a success: Polifonia met with nearly all of its…

29 September 2022

Meet the passionate Polifonia experts! Polifonia launches its own YouTube channel with a series of interviews with its brilliant team

Happy Monday! Polifonia is excited to announce the launch of its project YouTube channel. We are kicking…

24 January 2022
snapshot of Valentina Presutti presenting the Polifonia Knowledge Graph at Sonar

With its newly created demos, Polifonia showcased fascinating facets of discovering music similarity and music recommendations

On 28 October, Valentina Presutti presented the Polifonia demo and research at the new AI & Music…

2 November 2021

During the spring semester, first-year information and computer science students created a user interface to make data on pipe organs accessible to a wider audience. Polifonia is excited to report on this fruitful collaboration between our stakeholder Utrecht University (Frans Wiering) and the ORGANS pilot.

During the spring semester, first-year information and computer science students created a user interface…

9 June 2023

In this new series on the Polifonia project website, the team would like to shed light on early adopters who have re-used Polifonia’s output. Polifonia’s primary goal is for its software, datasets and other applications to be used and exploited by stakeholders and other parties. One of our early adopters is Global Education Digest’s, which re-uses Polifonia’s CLEF, the platform for crowdsourcing and cataloguing that was developed for musoW.

In this new series on the Polifonia project website, the team would like to shed light on early adopters…

2 June 2023

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. The TONALITIES pilot just released its first demo, including a video that takes you through the interface step by step!

TONALITIES is developing tools for the modal-tonal identification, exploration, and classification…

23 May 2023

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 and concepts implicitly present in the data, across different collections in different institutions. This process is currently mainly conducted manually, with the diverse results being rarely connected and shared in a way to be easily reused. To overcome the burden of this manual task, INTERLINK will focus on revealing and making compatible the entities and concepts hidden in digital music libraries and audiovisual archives. Pilot leader Jacopo de Berardinis tells in the latest video how they will do that with state-of-the-art methods for computational music analysis.

On Polifonia’s YouTube channel, we publish a series of videos about the pilots and work packages. Last…

8 May 2023

Andrea Poltronieri (UNIBO) is to present the paper The Harmonic Memory: a Knowledge Graph of harmonic patterns as a trustworthy framework for computational creativity at the Web Conference 2023, a yearly international conference on the topic of the future directions of the World Wide Web.

Andrea Poltronieri (UNIBO) is to present the paper The Harmonic Memory: a Knowledge Graph of harmonic…

2 May 2023

Many people would probably answer this question with a clear “no”. Is it because they really believe computers cannot? Or maybe there is an inner voice that refuses to believe that musical creativity is not exclusive to humans? In the meantime, AI systems such as DALL-E and ChatGPT have already proven unprecedented performance for generating images and textual artefacts, and are now becoming ubiquitous in our society. What about AI-generated music?

by Jacopo de Berardinis & Max Tiel Many people would probably answer this question with a clear…

26 April 2023

Polifonia pilot FACETS offers solutions for the challenging practice of content-based music retrieval. Pilot leader Raphaël Fournier-S’niehotta explains in the newest video on YouTube how this is helpful with navigating through music libraries.

On Polifonia’s YouTube channel, we publish a series of videos about the pilots and work packages. This…

17 April 2023

Following Polifonia’s successful Dom Tower excursion (ORGANS pilot) and Haptic Device workshops (ACCESS pilot), Polifonia again invited music lovers to come and explore music in relation to (art) history. Paul Mulholland (leader WP5) invited the Apollo Youth Panel to try out the Deep Viewpoints app with an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Following Polifonia’s successful Dom Tower excursion (ORGANS pilot) and Haptic Device workshops (ACCESS…

7 April 2023

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