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

Last year, the Polifonia project and new ways of engaging with our musical past were introduced to audiences of all ages during the European Night of the Researcher. This year, the Polifonia team looks forward to returning to this colorful event!

Last year, the Polifonia project and new ways of engaging with our musical past were introduced to audiences…

21 September 2023

The MEETUPS 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. A new demo video gives a sneak peak into the interface.

The MEETUPS pilot  focuses on supporting music historians and teachers by providing a Web tool that…

18 September 2023

This year, Europeana’s annual conference puts all things tech in the spotlight, with EuropeanaTech 2023 – Explore, Engage, Experience: cultural heritage in the data space and beyond led by the experts, developers and researchers from the R&D sector who make up the EuropeanaTech community.

This year, Europeana’s annual conference puts all things tech in the spotlight, with EuropeanaTech…

13 September 2023

Do you want to learn more about pipe organs, but can’t wait for the ORGANS Knowledge Graph to be ready? On Nationale Orgeldag (National Organ Day), organs can be viewed, played and heard throughout the Netherlands.

Do you want to learn more about pipe organs, but can’t wait for the ORGANS Knowledge Graph to be ready?…

7 September 2023

Last summer, the first version of the Polifonia Ecosystem was released. Now the project is ready to present an updated version with 22 datasets, 20 tools and 67 reports.

Last summer, the first version of the Polifonia Ecosystem was released. Now the project is ready to…

23 August 2023

How can one easily explore the relationships between people and music from the 19th century? MEETUPS is building a web tool that will be of interest to music historians. Learn more about MEETUPS here:

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

15 August 2023

by James McDermott

When writing a tune, when do composers repeat some material; when do they introduce a variation of previous material; and when do they introduce totally new material? To ask the same questions in a different way: what are the abstract syntactical structures in melodies?

by James McDermottWhen writing a tune, when do composers repeat some material; when do they introduce…

11 August 2023

How do you ensure that everyone can participate in musical activities? That’s the question the ACCESS is trying to answer and this Polifonia pilot is doing so by developing haptic devices in relation to music making. And by actively engaging users during workshops, as was the case at Milton Keynes International Festival 2023 (UK) last Sunday.

How do you ensure that everyone can participate in musical activities? That’s the question the ACCESS…

28 July 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