By Albert Meroño, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science (Knowledge Engineering) in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London
Polifonia is a new 3M€ project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme that has just kicked off on January 14, 2021. The goal of Polifonia is to map European musical traditions, developing novel computer science and AI techniques that can recreate the connections between music, people, places and events from the sixteenth century to the modern day. These findings will be released to the public as an interconnected global database on the Web – a knowledge graph – and will enhance our understanding of European musical heritage. Polifonia is led by a consortium of 10 European partners, and will run for 40 months.
Polifonia has a very special relationship with DARIAH, and more specifically with the AIM Working Group (Artificial Intelligence and Music). This working group was proposed by Enrico Daga and Albert Meroño, both now representing the Open University and King’s College London in the Polifonia consortium, to strengthen all fronts of advocacy at the intersection of Music and Artificial Intelligence. The working group had a very successful launch at the DARIAH conference 2019 in Warsaw, including a sensational keynote by Lev Manovich.
In parallel to this, one of the key tasks of Polifonia is to establish an Innovation Task Force (ITF) responsible for coordinating networking activities to foster the early creation of a stakeholder community, involving policy makers. The aim of creating such a community is to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Polifonia ecosystem at the end of the project; and, simultaneously, to contribute datasets, knowledge graphs, algorithms and recommendations to the growing community of AI and music scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts of the DARIAH WG.
It is this clear overlap between the goals of the DARIAH AIM WG and the Polifonia ITF that creates a unique shared space for collaboration, community building, and fostering of European research infrastructures, which we intend to continue working to grow.
