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.
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 this context, our general goal for the GVM project is to advance ethnomusicological research with a focus on traditional Georgian vocal music by employing computational methods from audio signal processing and music information retrieval (MIR). More specifically, we have three main objectives. First, we aim at improving the understanding of traditional Georgian vocal music by analyzing a newly-created corpus of (high-quality) field recordings. Second, by developing novel computational tools applied to a concrete music scenario, we want to explore and demonstrate the potential of computer-assisted methods for reproducible and corpus-driven research within the humanities. Third, by systematically processing and annotating a unique multimodal collection of field recordings as well as by implementing tools for accessing and analyzing this data with web-based technologies, our ambition is to contribute to the preservation and dissemination of the rich, yet endangered Georgian musical heritage.