Documenting bellfounding: the creation of a special gift

Polifonia Song Contest is two weeks in, and will continue for another two weeks. Have you downloaded the sample pack yet?

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!

The consortium is preparing for the last face-to-face consortium meeting of the Polifonia project in April 2024.

Polifonia is known for its strong links with academia and is pleased to present some highlights in its involvement in research and associated conferences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.