Listening from within a Digital Music Archive : Metadata, Sensibilities, and Music Histories in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's Music Archive

This thesis examines how digital music archives can facilitate different versions of the history of recorded music. It argues that digital technologies and metadata enable coexisting historical narratives of recorded music that move across time and musical genre, and that can cross geographical and cultural space. The study sees a correlation between archival strategies and the presentation of recorded music. It exemplifies this by examining the development and structuration of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). The thesis amplifies that the presentation of recorded music on DR’s in-house digital music platform /Diskoteket can impact how the music is perceived. It is asserted that music streaming experiences are directed by imaginaries of the history of recorded music, which can be guided by metadata. As this study is the first to have an explicit focus on DR’s music archive, it also offers a historical perspective alongside its more practical and technological analyses. The thesis traces the inner workings of DR’s digital music archive and assesses how its architecture makes for multiple and parallel histories of recorded music. It concludes that formations of metadata have the capability to deepen and change the perception and reception of music releases. The thesis argues that metadata give structure to DR’s digital music archive while also giving it meaning and purpose, and it suggests that this applies to all types of digital music archives

Salford postgraduate annual research conference (SPARC) 2012 proceedings

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2012 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC). They reflect the breadth and diversity of research interests showcased at the conference, at which over 130 researchers from Salford, the North West and other UK universities presented their work. 21 papers are collated here from the humanities, arts, social sciences, health, engineering, environment and life sciences, built environment and business

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

Communicating through sound in museum exhibitions: unravelling a field of practice

The twentieth century was the stage for several phenomena which have paved the way for museums to start exhibiting sound and to nurture a vivid and increasing interest in its potentialities. The burgeoning of sound recording technologies stands as a milestone in this respect. These have allowed sound to become a physical object and, hence, new understandings and conceptualizations to emerge. In the wake of these developments, the ways in which museum curators look at sound has gone into a huge reconfiguration. The fact that both new museology and museum practice have been turning their attention to and focus on the visitor has similarly accelerated the curators’ interest in sound as a means to build museum exhibitions. One of the latest and most striking instances in this process has been the role of ethnomusicology and sound studies in demonstrating the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical significance of sound thereby stimulating museum’s interest in dealing with sound as a mode to build both individual subjectivities and communities in museum settings. The development of audio technologies and digital and multisensorial technologies (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality) also plays a part in this process. These have the merit to provide ways to deal with the elusiveness of sound when exhibited in museum galleries and to facilitate interactions underpinned by rationales such as experience, embodiment, and emplacement. During at least the last ten years, there has been a boost in the development of sound-based multimodal museum practices. These practices, nonetheless, have yet to be mapped, and their representational and experiential (emotional and sensorial) opportunities to be closely analysed. My thesis strives to start closing this gap by taking two analytical steps. Based on the analysis of 69 sound-based multimodal museum exhibitions staged in Europe and in the United States of America, I provide a five-use framework categorizing sound-based multimodal museum practices into sound as a “lecturing” mode, sound as an artefact, sound as “ambiance”/soundtrack, sound as art, and sound as a mode for crowd-curation. The case-study of sound art The Visitors, it unravels the communicative potential of sound for museums. In detail, the analysis stresses how sound and space comingle to articulate individual subjectivities and a sense of “togetherness.” The scope of the thesis is clearly multidisciplinary, encompassing ethnomusicology, sound studies, museum studies, and social semiotics. Overall, I seek to contribute towards the development of the study of sound in museums to develop and establish as a cohesive research field. I moreover seek to foster a sensory formation shift from a visual epistemology to one that merges the visual and the auditory.O século XX foi palco de vários fenómenos que conduziram a que os museus começassem a expor o som e a demonstrar um interesse crescente pelas suas potencialidades comunicativas. O aparecimento das tecnologias de gravação sonora constitui-se como um momento fundamental neste processo. Ao permitirem que o som se estabeleça enquanto objeto físico, vieram potenciar o aparecimento de novos entendimentos e conceptualizações sobre o som. Na sequência destes acontecimentos, a forma como os curadores de exposições começaram a olhar para o som sofreu grandes alterações. Simultaneamente, o facto de tanto os estudos museológicos como a prática museológica estarem cada vez mais preocupados com o visitante veio também acelerar o interesse dos curadores pelo som como meio para construir exposições museológicas. Os estudos musicais, em particular a etnomusicologia e os estudos de som, tiveram igualmente um papel preponderante: ao demonstrarem o valor cultural, social, político, económico e ético do som vieram claramente estimular o interesse dos curadores em usar o som como material para trabalhar noções de identidade, subjectividade e “comunhão.” É ainda de destacar o papel que o desenvolvimento de tecnologias áudio, digitais e multisensoriais (Realidade Virtual, Realidade Aumentada e Realidade Mista) têm no processo. Ao proporcionarem formas de lidar com a imaterialidade do som quando exposto em galerias, vieram também fomentar interações museológicas sustentadas pela experiência. Nos últimos dez anos, os museus têm, pois, assistido ao incrementar das práticas museológicas multimodais baseadas no som. O mapeamento e a categorização destas práticas, bem como o estudo das suas potencialidades narrativas e experienciais (emocionais e sensoriais), no entanto, está claramente por determinar. A minha tese visa dar início ao colmatar desta lacuna através de dois passos: providenciar uma estrutura classificativa das práticas multimodais baseadas em som com base na análise de 69 exposições que tiveram lugar nos últimos dez anos na Europa e nos Estados Unidos da América. A estrutura compreende as seguintes categorias: som como um modo "discursivo," som como artefacto, som como "ambiance"/banda sonora, som como arte, e som como curadoria partilhada. Simultaneamente, dar início ao desvendar do potencial comunicativo do som para exposições museológicas através do estudo de caso de arte sonora The Visitors. A análise deste estudo de caso veio demonstrar que som, em articulação com o espaço permitem trabalhar noções de identidade, subjetividade, e ainda de “comunhão.” O âmbito da tese é claramente multidisciplinar e engloba a etnomusicologia, os estudos de som, os estudos museológicos e a semiótica social. De uma forma geral, com a minha dissertação procuro contribuir para o desenvolvimento e o estabelecimento do estudo do uso do som nos museus como um campo de investigação multidisciplinar e coeso. Procuro ainda potenciar uma mudança de formação sensorial nos museus, em particular, estimular a passagem de uma epistemologia visual para uma epistemologia simultaneamente visual e auditiva

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Since 1843: in the making, 8 January - 7 February 2014

Catalogue published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at Nottingham Trent University (Newton, Bonington and Waverley buildings) from 8 January-7 February 2014. The exhibition commenced a series of events to celebrate the 170th anniversary of what in 1843 was named the Nottingham School of Design, and is now the School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University