A Location-Tracking Interface for Ethnomusicological Collections

Abstract

Annotations of ethnomusicological collections are often incomplete or inconsistent, and searches involving artist’s or composer’s name often do not apply. We outline the current situation in ethnomusicological archives as well as the specificity of the use of ethnomusicological collections, in order to highlight the relevance of the development of appropriate access tools. We propose a novel system for intuitive exploration of ethnomusicological recordings which combines a geographical visual interface with ethnomusicological annotation and audio similarity matching, with the novel addition of dynamic location tracking. The starting point for designing the interface was a subset of the Cantometrics Training Tapes dataset, which was assembled by the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. For representing music tracks we use our manual musical and geographic annotation along with Lomax’s tags and comments. The novelty of the approach lies in the design of the interface allowing for a comprehensive representation of many layers of information specific to the needs of the users of ethnomusicological archives. This system allows integration of MIR tools, including low level and high level similarity search, and the visualization of their results. It displays a unique location tracking feature, where a dynamic highlighting device helps the user experience geographic distances between similar tracks and the cultures they originate from. A proof-of-concept implementation is presented, and evaluated according to three interrelated levels: a basic level of functionality (identifying and using components of the interface), a middle level concerned with the benefits and use of the software, and a reference to high level concerned with the social and cultural value of a system. Further research plans and suggestions are outlined.

Acknowledgments

This work was developed as part of the OMRAS2 project (http://www.omras2.org) funded by the EPSRC (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk) from 2007 to 2010. OMRAS2 aimed at creating a comprehensive high level music information retrieval system for musicologists and general users. The authors would like to thank the following OMRAS2 researchers: Michael Casey, Christophe Rhodes, Ben Fields and Tim Crawford.

Notes

Lomax’s Global Jukebox (Cooper et al., 2006) was developed in 1990s on a stand-alone computer workstation. A newer implementation of it on a subset of recordings was freely available on the website of the Association for Cultural Equity (www.ace.org) for some time. A demonstration video is now available on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx_hUrevOdw.

A demo movie is available on the author’s website, and can be available as supplementary material at http://vimeo.com/4331887.