Classical music is one of the greatest treasures of Europe’s cultural heritage. Although it is a historical genre, it is continually (re)interpreted and revitalized through musical performance. Today, most of the classical repertoire is in the public domain; massive numbers of scores and recordings are now available in online community-contributed repositories actively used by scholars and musicians. Technology offers ways to enrich and contextualize this repertoire, so that users might better understand and appreciate it.
However, because of variations in their quality and scale, this does not happen automatically for public-domain resources. Amidst today’s deluge of data, relevant associations across repositories and between modalities (e.g. from scores to recordings) still need to be made manually, while the insights of previous users are not explicitly stored for future users to learn from. It is thus impossible to get a comprehensive insight into the full wealth of our musical cultural heritage.
TROMPA will change this by massively enriching and democratizing our publicly available musical heritage through a user-centered co-creation setup. For analyzing and linking music data at scale, the project will employ and improve state-of-the-art technology. Music-loving citizens (including the large scene of amateur performers) will cooperate with the technology, giving feedback on algorithmic results, and annotating the data according to their personal expertise.
Following an open innovation philosophy, all derived knowledge will be released back to the community in reusable ways. This enables many uses in applications which directly benefit crowd contributors and wider audiences. TROMPA will demonstrate this for music scholars, content owners, instrumentalists, choir singers, and music enthusiasts. Via the consortium and associated partners, global audiences can be reached at an unprecedented scale, with potential outreach to millions of users.
The TROMPA project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770376.