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 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

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

Between 16 and 20 October, the Polifonia consortium met in the Italian city of Bologna, home of the project coordinator University of Bologna (UNIBO). During an intensive week, the project team took steps in the development of the pilots, including the long-awaited web portal. Read more about the 7th project meeting here.

Between 16 and 20 October, the Polifonia consortium met in the Italian city of Bologna, home of the…

27 October 2023

Friday Oct. 13, high school students are able to explore music history withcutting-edge technologies. The Music Meets Machines: Exploring Music’s Hidden Connections with AI and Knowledge Graphs  is a workshop organised by Polifonia and The Open University.

On Friday Oct. 13, high school students are able to explore music history withcutting-edge technologies.…

11 October 2023

ChoCo, the Chord Corpus, is out! After months of work the team is proud to release a 20K+ timed harmonic annotations of scores and tracks. Its release comes with a long awaited publication in the journal ‘Scientific Data’.

ChoCo, the Chord Corpus, is out! After months of work the team is proud to release a 20K+ timed harmonic…

6 October 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