The outcomes of the recent redesign of the Digital Libraries Federation (FBC) were presented at JCDL 2024, held in Hong Kong, China, on December 16–20, 2024.
In our paper, Improving the Discovery of Musical Heritage Documents in the Digital Libraries Federation Using Melodic Content Search and AI-based Optical Music Recognition, we outlined key enhancements introduced to the FBC operational workflow:

 
1.Adapting the Solr search engine to process MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) documents;
2. Integrating an AI-based Optical Music Recognition (OMR) framework that converts recognized scores into MEI format for indexing and processing by Solr;
3. Designing a brand-new user interface that enables users to enter melodic queries and explore search results more effectively.
 

The overarching goal of these developments was to introduce full-text and melodic content search capabilities, significantly improving the discovery and content-based retrieval of more than 45,000 sheet music objects aggregated in FBC — the largest Polish aggregator of digital cultural heritage resources.

The project Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Arts DARIAH PL was funded under the Smart Growth Operational Programme 2014–2020, Action 4.2 (call 4/4.2/2020). The project brought together the efforts of various research institutions operating in the field of the humanities, uniting them around a shared goal: the creation of specialised laboratories functioning under the common name Dariah.lab. Institutions whose representatives form the MIR group were actively involved in the project’s development. One of the outcomes of their work is the MusicPUT system (https://music-put.lab.dariah.pl/en), which aggregates online tools supporting musicological research, accessible from any place and at any time, including:
 
♪ ScoreScribe — a tool for automatic transcription of monophonic music recordings
♪ Timbra — a tool for the parametrisation, visualisation, and comparison of timbre
♪ OMRAT — a tool supporting the automatic annotation of musical documents for OMR purposes
♪ GOST — a tool for generating music tracks for computer games
♪ MEIconvert — a converter module enabling batch conversion between symbolic music formats (e.g., MusicXML ↔ MEI, MEI ↔ MIDI)
 

Thanks to these solutions, musicologists have gained tools that support the development of modern research methods based on ICT technologies.

Tools for ethnomusicologists and musicologists developed as part of the DARIAH-PL project were presented at an open seminar entitled “Season for Digital Humanities” during which the Poznań partners of the project – Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań University of Technology, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center – presented the results of their work.

The goal of the work carried out in the project by MIR-WG members was to develop methods and algorithms for data mining and knowledge discovery in music, with particular emphasis on traditional Polish music, based on machine learning.
At the seminar, Prof. Ewa Łukasik from the Poznań University of Technology presented MusicPUT – a group of tools supporting transcription of music into musical notation, sound color analysis, annotation and recognition of musical notation, and the generation of music for games. Seminar guests also had the opportunity to visit the laboratory at the PP Lecture Center and learn about the practical application of MusicPUT tools.

At DLfM 2023, we had the opportunity not only to present a new collection of traditional music that has recently been added to the MIRELA library, but also to introduce the MusicPUT platform to the conference audience.

MusicPUT brings together a set of online tools developed for musicological research within the DARIAH-PL project. The platform is designed with accessibility in mind, offering tools that allow researchers to carry out computer-assisted musicological analyses without requiring advanced programming skills.

Among the tools available on the platform are OMRAT, ScoreScribe, Timbra, GOST, and MEIConvert. Each of them supports different stages of working with musical data, with a particular emphasis on helping users explore and visualize their research results.

If you are interested in learning more about the platform and the tools it offers, take a look at our poster for further details.

It had been a while since we last presented our work at the DLfM conference series — which made us all the more excited to travel to Milan for its 10th edition, held on 10 November 2023, and hosted by the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Milano.

In our paper, Incorporating Symbolic Representations of Traditional Music into a Digital Library, we presented the results of MIRELA’s further development carried out as part of the FBC-TeNe project. The work focused on expanding the library with a collection of 4,000 musical transcriptions in symbolic formats (MIDI, MusicXML, and MEI), enriched with detailed textual metadata.
The collection features traditional songs and melodies from two ethnographic regions: Kashubia, Warmia and Masuria. Both the metadata and the musical transcriptions were prepared by expert ethnomusicologists. Additionally, we extended the metadata schema with contextual categories — such as song function and melody type — to support advanced search capabilities and enable comparative research.

The FBC-TeNe project was an initiative aimed at significantly enhancing access to the digital collections of Polish cultural and scientific institutions aggregated within the Digital Libraries Federation (FBC).
As a result, the new version of FBC now combines metadata and full-text search, allowing users to explore not only books and articles, but also sheet music, scores, and songbooks — thanks to OCR and OMR technologies.

A dedicated music search interface with a virtual keyboard lets users search by entering a melody (4–15 notes).

Additionally, over 4,000 traditional Polish songs and melodies from Kashubia and Warmia and Masuria regions are now available in MIRELA, published in MIDI, MusicXML, and MEI formats — with a built-in player for instant listening.
Discover new ways to explore digital cultural heritage!

The XV National Conference of Music Librarians was held on November 28-30 at the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in Wroclaw. In the Music Libraries session, Ewa Lukasik, Ph.D., presented information about the DARIAH-PL MIR WG group, the projects we are implementing and the tools we are developing, whose functionality fit the conference theme “Music Library – an idea tuned to the time”. The presentation included solutions for digital music libraries, such as OMR (Optical Music Recognition) systems, and transcription of music recordings into musical notation.

DARIAH-PL is a project whose objective is to build a research infrastructure for digital arts and humanities, including ethnomusicology. As part of this project, we are developing a number of useful tools for processing musical content, i.e., musical notations and recordings.

These tools include tools for automatic transcription of single-voice recordings and their representation in the form of musical notation, and automatic interpretation of musical notation scans using artificial intelligence methods (neural networks). In both cases, a transcript of the musical piece is obtained in one of several formats designed for “machine” representation of music – MEI, MusicXML, ABC, MIDI or EsAC, which allows for further processing and playback of the song using a number of music programs.

A tool for analyzing music recordings is also being developed. It determines the values of spectral parameters responsible for the impression of timbre, and visualizes the similarities of selected sounds based on various parameters characterizing their timbre. The timbre parameters can be used to identify the musical genre, the mood of the music, the type of musical instrument, human voices, etc. Work is also advanced on a prototype of a neural network-based system for generating music with different emotional overtones, which could, for example, assist game developers in preparing a music track.

The year-long FolkArtiNet project, whose objective was to identify technological solutions that could support folk music ensembles in their artistic activities, has come to an end. It was a very engaging and interesting project for us.

Locations of ensembles participating in the project

Here are some conclusions from the analysis of the data that we have collected:

• Some technology solutions are widely used. No one will probably be surprised by the widespread presence of folk ensembles on social media.
• Online repositories of musical and choreographic source materials are becoming more and more popular, however, we see a need for their further dissemination both as sources of information and tools for sharing ensembles’ own resources.
• In practice, ensembles’ digital materials documenting their activities are not stored in reliable repositories ensuring data security. They are often stored on local drives owned by team members.
• Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the organization of traditional rehearsals and meetings was severely limited, many ensembles did not consider remote rehearsals emphasizing the social aspect of meetings and the need for face-to-face contact during dance ensembles’ rehearsals. Band members, on the other hand, pointed out the negative impact of even small delays that occur in online communication on the synchronization, especially with livelier tunes.
• Live or VoD streaming of concerts is more common in the case of large artistic events, when recording is carried out with professional equipment by a team hired by the organizer. In the case of smaller concerts, lack of finances to purchase good quality equipment and train people is often a limiting factor in making concert and rehearsals recordings available online.

 
FolkArtiNet will be featured at the next year’s DARIAH Annual Event, which will take place May 31 – June 03, 2022.

The kick-off meeting for FBC TeNe took place on March 9 and has been attended by partners from Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center – leader of the project consortium, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Poznan University of Technology. The meeting was held as a videoconference due to the pandemic.

One of the elements of the agenda was presentation of an engineering project supervised by dr. Ewa Łukasik at the Institute of Computer Science of the Poznan University of Technology, related to OMR technology. Three students – Mateusz Kałamoniak, Zuzanna Piniarska and Michał Subocz – implemented a prototype of a system converting staff notation into symbolic representation, based on deep neural networks. Zuzanna Piniarska and Mateusz Kałamoniak participated in the meeting and presented stages of the conversion process, training sets, challenges they encountered and directions of the future system development.

OMR is one of the research areas addressed in FBC TeNe project. Tools that will be implemented as a result, will be used to generate symbolic representation of staff content
available in FBC and to make music content based indexing, search and filtering possible.

One more of  our project proposals has been qualified for financing. FBC-TeNe has  an objective to increase availability of digital resources of Polish cultural and scientific institutions by extending Digital Libraries Federation (FBC, https://fbc.pionier.net.pl/) functionality with content-based search.

Until now content search in FBC was based only on metadata. By generating digital resource representation that can be indexed we will be able to offer content-based search. That includes music content whose symbolic representation will be obtained with Optical Music Recognition methods. Such a representation will enable new ways of searching for digital music resources.

Verification and evaluation of project applications submitted under the Operational Programme Intelligent Development 2014-2020 Action 4.2 4/4.2/2020 has been completed and DARIAH-PL Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities project has been selected for funding.

The objective of the project is to build an infrastructure for research in a wide range of areas in arts and humanities, and for supporting research results applications in various branches of industry. The MIR WG member institutions are also members of the project consortium. Our objective is to develop machine learning based methods and algorithms for data and knowledge explorations in the fields of music, especially Polish traditional music.

One of the streams of the annual DARIAH Theme funding for 2020 was ‘Arts Exchanges’ with the goal to “… to embark on collaborative projects with artists and grow our understanding of the infrastructural requirements of this community with regards to the technologies they use”.

In our proposal “Folk music groups: their artistic practice and infrastructural needs in the COVID-19 era and beyond” we have planned cooperation with folk music artist groups with an objective to identify infrastructural requirements of this community in the COVID-19 era and beyond. We plan to investigate, understand and determine whether currently available tools and infrastructures can address the requirements or whether new tools and services should be developed.

The project has started on December 1, 2020 and will last 12 months.

The prototype of our ethnomusicological research environment was presented during ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). In the paper entitled „Digital Library Adaptation for Traditional Music and Content-Based Research: Polish Sound Archives and dLibra” we have presented our motivation for building music research support environment, a number of issues and challenges we have encountered in the process, the environment concept, building stages that have already been completed and plans for its further development.

JCDL is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. This year the conference took place in August, 1-5 in a virtual mode. During the Digital Libraries -3 session we have presented details on how the dLibra Digital Library Framework was adapted for traditional music content and integration with external music processing tools. The presentation was divided into three sections covering the current state of Polish sound archives in the context of existing music digital library systems (MDLs), dLibra Digital Library Framework and adaptations that have been applied to better serve music and music related content, and two web-based music processing modules, SoundScribe and WebEsAC.

Last year we had an opportunity to introduce an idea of music information research environment based on Polish traditional music archive and digital library software dLibra to MIR community at the 5th DLfM in Paris. Since then the idea has materialized in the form of MIRELA – Music Information Environment with dLibrA whose prototype will be presented at the 6th DLfM in Hague.
The presentation will cover the prototype content repository integrated with music processing modules and results of tests conducted with a set of musical samples and related multimodal data from the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ digitized phonographic archives of Polish traditional music.

The demo version of MIERLA repository has been open to public at https://mir-wg.dariah.pl/repo/dlibra. It contains a selection of recordings from IAPAS’ and exemplary outputs produced by WebEsAC and SoundScribe – two music processing modules integrated with dLibra. Due to its prototype status the repository is currently available in read-only mode.

WebEsAC 2.0 and SoundScribe,  applications implemented as a part of  MIR virtual research environment for scholars working on various aspects of traditional music, will be presented during DARIAH Annual Event 2019. This year conference will take place on May 15-17 in Warsaw and will concentrate on issues related to the nature of data collected by humanists.

As a MIR Working Group, we will have an opportunity  to present progress on developing virtual research environment for musicologists. The MIR virtual environment concept will be introduced during plenary session „Invited ignite talks” with a more detailed presentation given during   “Technical Solutions” session.

The starting point for the environment was MIR content repository. The subsequent steps included  development of music processing tools. WebEsAC, which offers an online access to a database containing symbolic representation of tunes in EsAC format, was extended with functionality to manage user access and rights, validate EsAC records, extract  scale, convert melodic line into a sequence of intervals and calculate various statistics. SoundScribe can transcribe melody from an audio file with pYIN algorithm.  The predominant melody of an audio recording is identified and  converted into MIDI data and symbolic music notation.

Download Book of Abstracts

WebEsAC, a prototype application  supporting archiving and searching for traditional Polish music in a symbolic text-based EsAC notation, has been presented at the XVII Symposium on  New Trends in Audio and Video (NTAV) in Poznań. NTAV is biennial event  organized by the Polish section of Audio Engineering Society.

EsAC was developed for monophonic music, with European folksong databases in mind. WebEsAC offers an online access to a database where each tune is saved as a separate record with a structure and melody representation defined by EsAC.  Implementation of EsAC-to-MIDI and MIDI-to-EsAC converters gives additional flexibility to the system and allows aural verification of encoded melody and rhythm. It is an example of functionality dedicated for music content that will be incorporated in MIR content repository.

A prototype MIR content repository has been set up based on dLibra digital library software developed by PSNC and with a sample of IAPAS phonographic collections. The repository is a starting point for further MIR WG research and development activities whose objective is to build a virtual research environment for scholars working on various aspects of traditional music.

The phonograpic collection sample includes metadata characterizing media and content, audio files, scans of archival documents with song lyrics and related photographs. The objects are organized into several collections.

dLibra – a repository software for digital libraries, archives and museums has been developed by PSCN since 1999. Using the dLibra package, the repository has been set up in a relatively short time required to configure a new instance for MIR needs related to metadata schema, music object characteristics, collection structure, and users access rights. dLibra offers a wide range of functionalities which makes the repository a good starting point for further work towards accessibility of  music content for analysis and sharing of musicology research results.

Our position paper  “Developing Music Digital Library based on Polish Traditional Music Archives and dLibra“ has been accepted for presentation at DLfM 2018 as a part of the Unlocking Musicology Challenge track.

The DLfM conference is a satellite event of the International  Society for  Music Information  Retrieval  Conference and a venue for those working on, and with, Digital Library systems and content in the domain of music and musicology.  The Unlocking Musicology Challenge track papers address questions related to offering enhanced mechanisms by which the public can explore collections of music and music-related material, and translating digital musicology approaches into commercial and third-sector applications. The event will take place on September 28, 2018 in Paris. 

Our paper presents an approach to developing a virtual environment for researchers interested in various aspects of traditional music. This undertaking draws on the combined expertise of theInstitute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences  in maintaining the largest archive of Polish traditional music and of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center  in developing dLibra digital library software  and research tools for digital humanities.

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The DARIAH 2018 event will take place on May  22- 24 in Paris. The annual event is an excellent opportunity for exchange of experience related to digital technologies for arts and humanities, among researchers from all over Europe.

It  will be an opportunity for MIR working group associated with DARIAH-PL, for an introduction  to  the DARIAH community at WG Marketplace, where various working groups present their activates and seek partners for future research projects.

Please check our poster

Recap of the DARIAH Annual Event 2018

Music Information Retrieval Working Group has been officially established by DARIH-PL Consortium Board. The group’s objective is  to develop and implement state-of-the-art music information retrieval  tools for large-scale interdisciplinary research musicology and ethnomusicology. The group  members are Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center  and Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology .