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UK funding (£5,199,943): Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption Ukri16 Jun 2014 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom

Overview

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Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption

Abstract Music is probably the most pervasive of the performing arts, and perhaps, the most abused (think of your recent shopping trips!). It has tremendous power to influence our emotions, often subliminally. The advent of recording in the 19th Century made it possible to enjoy music at a time, and in a place, different from the performance. Compression, broadband and the ever increasing capacity to aggregate large collections mean that the issues confronting music consumers have totally changed in nature: equally so for professionals, such as broadcasters (playlists for radio, music for documentaries, etc.) and those at the creative heart of the process: musicians, sound engineers and producers. The recorded music industry has grappled unsuccessfully with digital technology and the rate of adoption of new technologies has been slow, ironically, mostly in fear of piracy and loss of revenue. Given the social and economic importance of music, it is vital that the industry's crisis is averted and its decline reversed. Simple semantics and metadata are already helping (for example in recommendation and sharing services) but this is just the beginning. The next generation semantic technologies that are the focus of this proposal have the power to exact the turnaround that music (and other content industries) needs but this should be established via a fundamental and principled exploration of how semantic technologies underpin music throughout the value chain. The proposal brings the very latest technologies to bear on the complete industry, end-to-end, producer to consumer, making the production process more fruitful, the consumption process more engaging, and the delivery and intermediation more automated and robust. In this project we will address 3 premises: (i) that Semantic Web technologies should be deployed throughout the content value chain from producer to consumer; (ii) that advanced signal processing should be employed in the content production phases to extract "pure" features of perceptual significance and represent these in standard vocabularies; (iii) that this combination of semantic technologies and content-derived metadata leads to advantages (and new products and services) at many points in the value chain, from recording studio to end-user (listener) devices and applications. The project will work with partners from industry - BBC R&D, Microsoft Research Cambridge and Omnifone) as well as internationally - the International Audio Labs, a joint initiative of the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangan and the local university, and the Internet Archive, one of the world's major on-line libraries. We will engage with other universities in the UK supported by a partnership fund and via the BBC Audio Research Partnership. This long term project will foster new ways for professionals to work with music in the studio and for consumers to engage in their homes. It will support new business models that emphasise the whole experience of musical involvement, and discover ways to monetise the metadata as well as the essential content. The technologies to be researched support new ways of learning (about and to play) music as well as new ways of teaching and performing. And because the project will encompass vast quantities of music data and metadata, from heterogeneous sources, and will stress test emerging principles of big data, distributed intelligence and future generation web, it also addresses key questions of wide significance to EPSRC's ICT Programme, particularly relating to Intelligent Information Systems and Working Together.
Category Research Grant
Reference EP/L019981/1
Status Closed
Funded period start 16/06/2014
Funded period end 31/12/2019
Funded value £5,199,943.00
Source https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FL019981%2F1

Participating Organisations

Queen Mary University of London
Aalborg University
Royal Northern College of Music
Software Sustainability Institute
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Deezer
Goldsmiths, University of London
Sustrans
Nursing and Midwifery Council
Pompeu Fabra University
New York Philharmonic
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
B3 MEDIA
New York University
Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
UNIMEDIA
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
University of Illinois
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Internet Archive
Rough Trade Records
Omnifone
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Free University of Amsterdam
Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall
Luleå University of Technology
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE
Friedrich-Alexander Univ of Erlangen FAU
Microsoft Research Ltd
British Broadcasting Corporation - BBC

The filing refers to a past date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state. The current state is available on the following page: Queen Mary University of London, London.

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