Project Kick-off
Polifonia partners meeting and project kick-off in January
Fifty people representing all ten Polifonia partners joined the digital kick-off meetings scheduled over four days, between 14th and 29th January 2021. It was an interesting introduction to the Polifonia project with c. twenty plenary and parallel sessions and a great opportunity to meet the partners and discuss in detail the project’s content and execution. The consortium members delivered presentations on their respective institution and working groups focusing on topics such web portals and knowledge extraction from texts to inclusive audience engagement with musical heritage among others. Furthermore, key decisions were made to set-up a strong project pipeline. Firstly, the Polifonia partners agreed to conduct a survey to better understand the expectations of the teams participating in the Pilots. The first version of the survey will be sent to the pilot leaders at the beginning of February. Secondly, lists of important resources and tools were collected which can be used as a starting point. These included online archives, catalogues, musical periodicals as well as tools for knowledge extraction, for annotation and for sentiment analysis, among others. Thirdly, specific goals and deadlines were set for the coming months in line with the project milestones and deliverables. Finally, the Polifionia members met at ‘the social dinner’, a fun evening where everyone showed their masterchef skills by cooking a colleague’s recipe from a different country, and did an exciting music quiz uncovering Rachmaninov references in songs by the rock band Muse.