Projects
CNRS Consortium Musica
Présentation
As a partner of the CREM and TGIR Human-Num, consortium Musica, brings together several research units and teams around a common theme: the development and growth of digital music data through the use of common repositories, and the dissemination of good coding practices and data digitization operations.
One of Musica’s objectives is to coordinate the epistemological reflection of researchers, as well as the development of new tools for representation and analysis of music. These tools will be compatible with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript languages, which are the new standards of the internet and enable the creation of interactive multimedia devices easily adaptable to diverse projects. Particular attention will be paid to the ways of integrating these new representation tools with those developed in the consortium research axes, namely the creation of corpuses of musical scores and the development of online sound archives platforms.
The consortium is organized around 3 main research axes under the direction of Philippe Vendrix (Centre for Higher Education in the Renaissance Tours, France UMR 7323 – project participant), Victor Stoichita (Center for research in ethnomusicology, UMR 7186) and Hugues Genevoix (Laboratory of Musical Acoustics, UMR 7190).
Axis 1. Scored Music: MEI – OCRisation of Sources
The Center for Higher Education in the Renaissance, located at University François-Rabelais of Tours, France, manages this first axis. Its mission threefold. First, it aims to disseminate and coordinate good musical coding practices, in particular adopting the possibilities offered by the new technologies of MEI (Music Encoding Initiative). Second, it applies these coding practices not only to familiar repertoires – the music of the 15th and 16th centuries – but also to the music of other historical periods. Third, it intends to accomplish the two aforementioned goals with the participation of partner laboratories such as the IReMus (Institute for Research in Ethnomusicology, UMR 8223), le CMBV (Centre for Baroque Musique of Versailles), and IRCAM (Institute of Acoustics/Musical Research and Coordination).
Axis 2. Recorded Music: digitization, indexation, sound analysis
The Centre for Research in Ethnomusicology and the LAM have, in recent years, acquired a strong technical and scientific expertise in the digital processing, preservation, and archiving of sound collections. For example, the web-audio platform Telemeta was created, and currently holds 23 200 sound items available online for consultation. The systematic processing of archives as well as the documentary enrichment of collections responds to the growing specific needs of those involved research. In collaboration with researchers and multimedia professionals, with a goal of enhancing the value of this musical heritage for the whole community, this growing digital and technical expertise contributes to the fulfilment of the objectives fixed by the consortium.
Axis 3. Les Instruments: updated classification tools, status of object
The third axes focuses on the study of sound sources (LAM, IRCAM, IreMus, CREM-LESC), which is based on various scientific and empirical approaches in both the human and physical sciences: instrument making and material processing, tuning and measurement systems, physical or physiological aspects of operation and mechanisms, playing techniques and musical gestures, psycho-acoustics and perception, universal and vernacular classification systems, organology in its historical dimension, musical iconography etc.…Semantically, one of the challenges of linking music resources, catalogues, and databases will be to rethink and complete classification systems in a triple dimension – collaborative, multidisciplinary, and multilingual – and through the merging of repositories, especially of the multilingual thesaurus and musical instruments.