Framework: ASEA-Uninet
Duration: 2018–24
Project lead mdw: Alex Hofmann (IWK)
Project lead TU-Vie: Andreas Rauber (IFS)

Towards an alliance for distributed ethnomusicology data

Project Description:

While the South-East Asian musical heritage is particularly rich, it is highly diverse and scattered across multiple countries and regions. The same holds for existing ethno-musicological resources. Research in musicology involves various kinds of data, ranging from written sources (manuscripts, music sheets, publications, etc) to audio and video recordings in different formats (analogue, digital) with varying additional information (Metadata) about contents and contexts oft he performances, the performers, their ideas and viewpoints, musical instruments and the way of their use and so on. Until now, researchers and institutions have developed primarily individual ways to collect and store such data, either digitally or in a card-index cabinet. Data search in such self-contained storages is difficult and searching across multiple storages can be very time consuming. This presents a barrier for conducting contemporary, computer-aided musicological research. For instance, incompatible data structures prevent applying automated data analysis and indexing across music collections to provide new ways to access the data and gain new insights. This includes the use of visualization techniques and state-of-the-art machine learning methods on existing data sets, which may reveal hidden connections between different areas within music research.

This project will examine the current situation of data sets in ethno-musicology towards the development of standardized ways for data storage and data access between partner organizations. To this end, we plan to form an initial alliance that collects the requirements for an interoperable data infrastructure for digital musicology projects in the South-East Asian region and builds first examples of tentative applications by means of automatic content and metadata analysis. Goal of the project is to design a strategy that allows the storage of data sets in a standardized way that supports an exchange of (meta) data between partner organizations.

Find all details here: https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/asea-ethmusdb/

Funding

This research project was jointly supported by the ASEAN-European Academic University Network (ASEA-UNINET), the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD-GmbH).