„ANZEL, ARE YOU ALIVE OR DEAD?“


Or why folk music is interesting(for computers)

Folk music is an integral part of a nation’s cultural heritage, and represents a memory of past lives, customs and traditions. As in the modern world it has all but disappeared, but its preservation, accessibility and promotion are an important part of national (and European) identity.
In our talk, we’ll present our research in MIR techniques for analysis of folk music and discuss why specialized methods are needed for analyzing this type of music. We’ll focus on analysis of ethnomusicological field recordings, which, from the beginnings of the 20th century to the present, represent documents of folk music performances stored in ethnomusicological archives, nowadays increasingly digitized and made available on the web. As the name suggests,these recordings are made in the field (as opposed to studio environments), with all the imperfections brought by degradation of media, environmental noises and quality of performance. Our objective therefore is to develop robust algorithms for the analysis of folk music recordings that will expose them to a wider audience and also aid ethnomusicologists perform their studies on large collections, which became available with the digitization of archives, compared to small
numbers of hand-annotated recordings – the prevailing practice so far.
We will focus on our recent work on segmentation and transcription of field recordings and shortly present EtnoFletno (www.etnofletno.si),
a recently finished project dedicated to the promotion of Slovenian folk
music.