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
Helen Barlow explains the relevance children’s experience of music in the past and how to find the historical evidence for it
Music and Childhood is one of ten pilots in the Polifonia research project into European musical heritage,…
‘From churches to public buildings: ICCD-ICBSA’s research into sound begins with the bells in Italy’ Carlo Birrozzi shares insights on Polifonia
For International Archives Day celebrated on 9 June, we are happy to share a fascinating interview with…
Jacopo de Berardinis brings his expertise in Music Information Retrieval to the Polifonia project
Jacopo de Berardinis is a postdoctoral research associate at King's College London, currently…
Dr. Simon Holland founder and director of the Music Computing Lab at Open University introduces their fascinating work and the ACCESS Pilot
The Music Computing Lab at The Open University is a research lab focused on empowering musicians, illuminating…
More 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…
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 20th century. The pilot has a broader…
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…
The aim of this use case is to co-design, develop and evaluate wearable haptic technology to enable people who are Deaf or hearing impaired to engage as audience members in live performances.