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

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

Crowdsourcing Linked open data Entities via web Form

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LHARP

Local Harmonic Agreement based on Recurrent Patterns

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ChoCo

The Chord Corpus

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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

First-year computer science students from Utrecht University on a field trip to the medieval cathedral in Utrecht, a strange sight? In the world of Polifonia, these two go very well together!

First-year computer science students from Utrecht University on a field trip to the medieval cathedral…

21 March 2023

Polifonia’s TONALITIES develops tools for the modal-tonal identification. Pilot leader Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann explains the ambition of the pilot that evolves around musical pattern extractions on our YouTube channel.

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

15 March 2023

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming AVA_Net webinar on connecting music collections.

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming…

6 March 2023

Polifonia now offers a brand new section on the website where the project’s outputs are collected and displayed.

Polifonia now offers a brand new section on the website where the project’s outputs are collected…

27 February 2023

The latest Polifonia tool opens doors of multilingual textual musical heritage resources. Find out what you can do with this tool and how it was developed.

Università di Bologna (UniBo) launches the long–awaited web application Polifonia Corpus, as part…

24 February 2023

Polifonia’s project leader Valentina Presutti (University of Bologna) is one of the 4 keynote speakers at the upcoming edition of ICAART 2023.

Polifonia’s project leader Valentina Presutti (University of Bologna) is one of the 4 keynote speakers…

22 February 2023

The rich culture of Italian bells and bell towers is captured by Polifonia’s BELLS. Pilot leader Elena Musumeci explains this ambition in our latest YouTube video:
#bells #belltowers #heritage #tangibleheritage #italianculture

The bell tower is certainly one of the architectural elements that best characterize the Italian landscape.…

15 February 2023

Applications are now open for participation in The International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS 2023) in Bertinoro (Italy), from June 11th to June 17th, 2023. Sign up quickly as there are only 60 spots and the closing date of March 30th 2023 is approaching!

Applications are now open for participation in The International Semantic Web Research Summer School…

2 February 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