News Story

Polifonia, An EU Project Launch

Kiran Parmar, Wednesday 13 Jan 2021

The Polifonia project kick off meeting was held today.

The project aims to identify and recreate connections between music, people, places and events from the 17th century to the modern day. Funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Framework Programme, project partners such as, King’s College in London, and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences met virtually, (due to COVID19 restrictions) to introduce their research teams and to set the executive working agenda for the next six months.

Polifonia will help create a vast resource of computational knowledge in the form of a knowledge graph network of interconnected data from all the main musical heritage sources with one single point of access, to uncover these phenomena systematically. Working in close relation with musicologists and historians of music, Polifonia will develop methods and tools to help understand the evolution of European musical heritage in space and time. Themes include the transition of music genres across borders, the experiences of music in childhood, and the tracing of musical ideas through musicians’ encounters in history. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, Polifonia will analyze sounds, texts and musical scores and develop novel approaches to interact with music content for the benefit of scholars, musicians, and citizens.

KMi leads the OU team, which have researchers from the Music Computing Lab and the Music Department. Enrico Daga will carry out the role of Technical Director for the project and lead KMi’s research on knowledge graph construction for Polifonia and the work package of Human Interaction with Music, in collaboration with Paul Mulholland and Simon Holland (Music Computing Lab). The project is coordinated by the University of Bologna and will run until April 2024.