Bells

Preserving historical bells cultural heritage

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. Bell heritage is complex and fascinating and influences our perception of the places we live daily. Both its tangible and intangible assets, and their dependencies are hardly encoded explicitly: most of this heritage is transmitted orally. This pilot intends to encode this valuable information in a knowledge graph, which will be publicly available and particularly relevant for scholars and cultural institutes. 

 In the collective perception, bell tower is certainly one of the architectural elements that best characterize the Italian landscape. To better understand their value could be considered how Bell Towers can play a cultural role in the Italian society, thanks to their recurring presence in the space landscapes. 

Moreover, Bell Tower could be mostly considered a very large musical instrument capable of hosting a belfry and bells that allow to reproduce different kinds of sounds. The musical instrument could define very specific identity values for each territorial area of reference thanks to the traditional culture. Those kinds of values are related to the materials used, the construction characteristics, the tradition of the operators, the musical repertoire and the function of the bell instrument, as well as values are also related to intangible aspects such as human know-how and the ways of transmitting this knowledge and practice. The historical Bell heritage can therefore be defined as a complex set of two kinds of elements that take place in a specific territorial area: material (bell tower, belfry,  armor, bell) and immaterial (oral tradition, musical repertoire, language, sound practices, traditional techniques). 

The Bell pilot aims to provide tools and methods, through which Historical Bells heritage can be better known and put in relation with other parts of cultural heritage. The final interface will enable users to navigate through the connections between bells sound, tangible heritage (bells, bell Towers) and intangible heritage (sound practices, oral transmission of knowledge among communities and bearers of tradition). 

 

Recent News

During the spring semester, first-year information and computer science students created a user interface to make data on pipe organs accessible to a wider audience. Polifonia is excited to report on this fruitful collaboration between our stakeholder Utrecht University (Frans Wiering) and the ORGANS pilot.

During the spring semester, first-year information and computer science students created a user interface…

9 June 2023

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. The TONALITIES pilot just released its first demo, including a video that takes you through the interface step by step!

TONALITIES is developing tools for the modal-tonal identification, exploration, and classification…

23 May 2023

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 and concepts implicitly present in the data, across different collections in different institutions. This process is currently mainly conducted manually, with the diverse results being rarely connected and shared in a way to be easily reused. To overcome the burden of this manual task, INTERLINK will focus on revealing and making compatible the entities and concepts hidden in digital music libraries and audiovisual archives. Pilot leader Jacopo de Berardinis tells in the latest video how they will do that with state-of-the-art methods for computational music analysis.

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

8 May 2023

Polifonia pilot FACETS offers solutions for the challenging practice of content-based music retrieval. Pilot leader Raphaël Fournier-S’niehotta explains in the newest video on YouTube how this is helpful with navigating through music libraries.

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

17 April 2023

Polifonia’s TONALITIES develops tools for the modal-tonal identification. Pilot leader Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann explains the ambition of the pilot that evolves around musical pattern extractions on our YouTube channel.

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

15 March 2023

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming AVA_Net webinar on connecting music collections.

Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute, KNAW), pilot leader of ORGANS and TUNES, is part of the upcoming…

6 March 2023

The rich culture of Italian bells and bell towers is captured by Polifonia’s BELLS. Pilot leader Elena Musumeci explains this ambition in our latest YouTube video:
#bells #belltowers #heritage #tangibleheritage #italianculture

The bell tower is certainly one of the architectural elements that best characterize the Italian landscape.…

15 February 2023

Recently, the ORGANS pilot released a press statement about its ambitions in order to reach all pipe organ enthusiasts about the upcoming Knowledge Graph on organ history. Also, the stakeholder network video is now on our YouTube channel, in which pilitor leader Peter van Kranenburg explains the work being done in this pilot.

Recently, the ORGANS pilot released a press statement about its ambitions in order to reach all pipe…

17 January 2023

Associazione Campanari Liguri with the cooperation of Polifonia, MiC, ICCD, Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Genova e la provincia di La Spezia are organising a bell concert at the church of San Pietro Apostolo, Avegno (Italy). This is the first of a series of concerts that will be part of, and inspired by our BELL pilot.

Associazione Campanari Liguri with the cooperation of Polifonia, MiC, ICCD, Soprintendenza Archeologia…

6 September 2022

Mari Wigham and Philo van Kemenade from Sound & Vision investigate how graph representations can help users of the CLARIAH Media Suite in their search within music collections.

Mari Wigham and Philo van Kemenade from Sound & Vision investigate how graph representations can…

8 April 2022

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