Partner introduction: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Sound and Vision is home to one of the largest music collections in the Netherlands
What is the relation between your organisation/institution and music?
Sound and Vision is home to one of the largest music collections in the Netherlands. As a national audio-visual archive, we hold close to half a million music carriers, ranging from wax cylinders to records and CDs. The television archive also holds concert registrations and music programs and our storage rooms are filled with technological objects related to music history. We are looking to improve access to these collections for researchers, but also for the general public, by providing innovative tools for increased understanding and engagement with these collections.
What do you bring to the Polifonia project?
Apart from access to our music collections, we bring knowledge and open-source tooling for building knowledge graphs and thematic presentations based on these graphs to the Polifonia project, especially to the INTERLINK pilot. In the Netherlands we are collaborating with other heritage institutions to create a distributed network of heritage information, in which individual institutions publish their metadata at the source as Linked Data. Third party users can then query these collections in a knowledge graph, and create presentations on topics that are relevant to their specific communities or users.
What do you hope to get out of the Polifonia project?
The history of music is not confined to individual nations: performers, musical genres and compositions spread across Europe, influencing each other. Therefore, a European perspective on our musical heritage is much needed. Also, until now, Sound and Vision has restricted itself to building graphs based on metadata. The Polifonia project aims to go further and provide data based on an in-depth analysis of the music itself which will offer fascinating new insights into our musical heritage.
Image credits: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum. Hay Kranen, CC-BY 4.0
Recent News
The Polifonia project formally ended on April 30, which means that the tools and software developed within this 4-year-project are released and ready for use. Today we look at ‘Patterns UI’.
The Polifonia project formally ended on April 30, which means that the tools and software developed…
Polifonia Song Contest is two weeks in, and will continue for another two weeks. Have you downloaded the sample pack yet?
With two weeks to go until the deadline, the "Polifonia Song Contest" beckons all musicians who find…
Are you the type of musician that is inspired by old sounds, such as cheerful Irish folk melodies, the majestic resonance of pipe organ concerts, and the timeless chimes echoing from century-old Italian bell towers? Then ‘Polifonia Song Contest’ is your challenge!
Are you the type of musician that is inspired by old sounds, such as cheerful Irish folk melodies, the…
The consortium is preparing for the last face-to-face consortium meeting of the Polifonia project in April 2024.
The consortium is preparing for the last face-to-face consortium meeting of the Polifonia project in…
Polifonia is known for its strong links with academia and is pleased to present some highlights in its involvement in research and associated conferences.
Polifonia is known for its strong links with academia and is pleased to present some highlights in its…
In 2024, Paul Mulholland, Naomi Barker and Paul Warren (The Open University, U.K) are continuing their experiment investigating how different kinds of music influence the appreciation of an artwork; and to what extent the same kind of sense-making processes are used when viewing artwork and when listening to music. To do this, the researchers are looking for more participants. They have now automated the process so that participants can complete the experiment online without the involvement of an experimenter.
Music instrument with music notes on white background illustration In 2024, Paul Mulholland, Naomi…
During the last project meeting, the Polifonia consortium extensively discussed how to foster the impact of the project in academia and beyond. How to make the output of Polifonia sustainable after the lifetime of the project is one important aspect. But fostering re-usability does not end by long-term preservation of certain assets (such as data and tools). In Polifonia Research Ecosystem – Impact of a project. A webinar on Data re-use and workflows, we will discuss how we ensure that more fluid assets such as interfaces, but also experiences in setting up and executing workflows via those interfaces, become reproducible and reuseable.
During the last project meeting, the Polifonia consortium extensively discussed how to foster the impact…
For the Polifonia project, the Central Institute for Cataloging and Documentation (ICCD) of the Italian Ministry of Culture is carrying out activities on the historical bell heritage. The ICCD has also initiated a process of documentation of the practices and knowledge associated with bell production through collaboration with historical Italian foundries.
The bell casting process performed by the Pontifical Marinelli Foundry. Photo courtesy of ICC For…
One of the tools Polifonia will release is MELODY. It stands for ‘Make mE a Linked Open Data StorY’ and is a place where you can make sense of Linked Open Data and publish text-based as well as visual data stories. Earlier this year, students of the University of Bologna explored data through this tool. Let’s see what they have found and learned about… rock music.
One of the tools Polifonia will release is MELODY. It stands for 'Make mE a Linked Open Data StorY'…
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…
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 101004746