Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: MU 2686/13-1
Start date : 01.05.2018
End date : 30.04.2021
Website: https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/fau/professor/mueller/projects/gvm
Georgia has a rich cultural heritage. Its traditional polyphonic vocal music, which has been acknowledged as Intangible Cultural Heritage by the UNESCO in 2001, is one of the most prominent examples. Being an orally transmitted culture, most of the sources are available as field recordings (often with rather poor audio quality). Musicological research using these sources has usually been conducted on the basis of notated musical scores, which were obtained by manually transcribing the audio material. Such approaches are problematic since important tonal cues and performance aspects are likely to get lost in the transcription process. Furthermore, previous studies often suffer from subjectivity and reproducibility issues. In the GVM project, our main objective was to advance ethnomusicological research focusing on traditional Georgian vocal music by employing computational methods from audio signal processing and music information retrieval (MIR). To this end, we considered three main objectives.
Our first objective was to improve the understanding of traditional Georgian vocal music by analyzing existing and newly created corpora of field recordings.
In the second objective, we aimed at developing novel computational tools for processing and analyzing field recordings of polyphonic singing. Considering the tonal analysis of traditional Georgian vocal music as a concrete application scenario, we explored their potential for corpus-driven research in the humanities.
By systematically processing and annotating multimodal collections of field recordings and implementing tools for accessing and analyzing this data using web-based technologies, our third objective was to contribute to the preservation of the rich Georgian musical heritage.