SoundTracer workshop 2017: Matija Marolt on "Music information retrieval for folk music archives"
Channel: UniOslo_IMV
Date: 01/04/2018

Presentation held at the SoundTracer workshop held at the National Library of Norway 7 December 2017.

While music information retrieval (MIR) can nowadays be treated as a mature research field with many applications in popular and classical music, we have yet to realize its full potential for analysis of folk music. I will discuss our efforts in applying MIR techniques to materials gathered by the Slovenian Institute of Ethnomusicology. The archive contains a large number of folk music field recordings, song transcriptions, song lyrics, images and folk dance videos, with metadata that varies a lot in quantity and quality. Our goal is thus to make the archive more accessible to researchers, as well as the wider community. I will outline our method for segmentation of long field recordings into individual items and the accompanying tool SeFiRe, our work in transcription of polyphonic singing and bell chiming, the methods we use for searching the archive, as well as research in analysis of melodic patterns and tune family classification. I will also present our EtnoFletno application that exposes part of the collection to the general public, as well as results of a user interface design study for an interface that would be suitable for different user groups.

Matija Marolt is associate professor with University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, where he has been working since 1996. He is head of Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Multimedia, where his research interests include music information retrieval, specifically semantic description of audio signals, retrieval and organization in music archives, and human-computer interaction.