Blog

CompMusic has finished, and our funding agency, ERC, asked us to write a brief report. Here is it.

Achievements along the main objectives/activities

The CompMusic project has been a big and long project with many achievements, impossible to summarize here. For a presentation of all the results please check the project website. Here we try to just highlight the main achievements.

The main objectives of the project, as stated in the initial proposal were:

Last December (2015), Barcelona’s Conservatori Municipal de Música hosted two sessions of Chinese traditional music, the first one devoted to the silk and bamboo music genre and the second one to jingju (Beijing opera). For this occasion, two music formations based in London were invited, the Silk & Bamboo Ensemble and the UK-Chinese Opera Association. Each of them offered a presentation of their respective music genre, explaining its main characteristics and demonstrating some aspects of it, and afterwards a full performance. This event was the result of the joint efforts of several local institutions, namely Barcelona Confucius Institute Foundation, Casa Asia, the Conservatori Municipal de Música de Barcelona, CompMusic and the Phonos Foundation. You can find the hand programmes (in Spanish) for these events in the links below, and the corresponding videos in this Youtube list.

Dec10-Silk_and_Bamboo.pdf

Dic11-Jingju.pdf

Last May, Xavier Serra, Zhang Shuo and Rafael Caro spent more than two weeks in China visiting different companies and universities with the aim of sharing our research on jingju music and the hope of finding possible collaborators for CompMusic. From May 15th to May 28th we visited five universities, three music conservatories, three companies, one theatre academy and one research centre, giving fifteen talks both in Chinese and English to audiences ranging from computer engineers to musicologists, musicians and music aficionados (you can find here an abstract of the presentation, the slides and related videos). In each of these venues we received a warm welcoming and interest from the audience.

Shuo, Xavier and Rafael in front of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

On December 13th, 14th and 15th, we organized the 3rd CompMusic workshop together with several other events at IIT-Madras (Chennai, India), all of them related to the work we are doing on Carnatic and Hindustani music. On the 13th we organized a research workshop to present current research results, on the 14th we organized a special seminar aimed to the general public and dedicated to the tools we are developing for the exploration and appreciation of Carnatic music, and on December 15th there was a lecture demonstration by the mridangam virtuoso Dr. Umayalpuram K Sivaraman. The slides and video recordings of most of the presentations are available online.

From the 15th to the 26th of July 2013, some members of the MTG participated to the Galata Electroacoustic Orchestra Intensive Program (GEO-IP). GEO-IP is a summer school under the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme whose aim is to fuse the traditional music of Istanbul, Genoa and Barcelona with contemporary electronic music. These three Mediterranean harbor-cities have been in commercial and cultural exchange for centuries, and share numerous historical, sociological, cultural and architectural connections. An example is the Galata Tower in Istanbul, which also gives its name to the orchestra. This landmark was built by the Genoese in the 14^th century.

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summerSchool.jpg

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On February 2013 I made a trip to Morocco, together with Mohamed Sordo, to attend an Andalusian music festival in Fez and to meet with the musician and musicologist Amin Chaachoo in Tetouan. This was the first trip to Morocco in the context of CompMusic and the objective was to stablish contacts and to decide the first steps to take in our research on Andalusian music, which is one of the five music cultures that we want to focus on. 

On the weekend of November 10th-11th, the CompMusic team hosted the annual MusicBrainz summit (in its 9th edition) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. The yearly summit is an opportunity for the geographically diverse MusicBrainz community to meet for a few days and do high-level planning for the next year of site development. As most communication in the MusicBrainz world is performed over email and internet chat, it is useful to get together face-to-face to quickly come to an agreement on topics that otherwise may take a long time to discuss online.

In publications, it is many times necessary to include Indic terms that cannot, or should not, be translated. Hence, we use the terms transliterated to latin script. In most scientific papers and other publications we find those terms transliterated very liberally. This results in two problems: (i) Ambiguity in their pronunciation (Eg: whether to elongate a vowel or not), (ii) Multiple spellings for a given word (Eg: Sourashtram, Saurastram).  This is the reason why good publishing houses use a transliteration standard which enforces consistency and improves readability. ISO 15919 is one such widely used standard which defines a transliteration/romanization scheme for all the Indic scripts/languages. It is a super-set of IAST which is defined for Sanskrit. 

How To- Romanization of Indic text.pdf