Romanian Language Technology — a view from an academic perspective

The article reports on research and developments pursued by the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence "Mihai Draganescu" of the Romanian Academy in order to narrow the gaps identified by the deep analysis on the European languages made by Meta-Net white papers and published by Springer in 2012. Except English, all the European languages needed significant research and development in order to reach an adequate technological level, in line with the expectations and requirements of the knowledge society

Towards a Semantic Architecture for the Internet of Musical Things

The Internet of Musical Things is an emerging research area that relates to the network of Musical Things, which are computing devices embedded in physical objects dedicated to the production and/or reception of musical content. In this paper we propose a semantically-enriched Internet of Musical Things architecture which relies on a semantic audio server and edge computing techniques. Specifically, a SPARQL Event Processing Architecture is employed as an interoperability enabler allowing multiple heterogeneous Musical Things to cooperate, relying on a music-related ontology. We technically validate our architecture by implementing an ecosystem around it, where five Musical Thing prototypes communicate between each other

Encoding Scores for Electronic Music

A perspective on the specific issues of music encoding dealing with Electronic Music is presented. In many cases the works to be discussed exist in a fixed media format and hence no prescriptive score is necessary to facilitate a ‘valid’ performance. While there are a number of descriptive scores for pieces of Electronic Music, these are to be treated differently, as they are purely aimed at analysis and therefore contain a certain information bias. Data that is more comparable to instrumental scores is contained in rare examples of so-called realization scores. It is argued that these realization scores can be identified as the main subject for encoding of Electronic Music works. For this we will discuss an example from one such score by Karlheinz Stockhausen. For his piece KONTAKTE, Stockhausen released a realization score that unfolds a very detailed documentation of all steps made within the studio production of that work, including the complex patching of studio devices and the specific transformation processes achieved by the use of tape machines. The paper presents an approach to formalize and encode all these steps within the framework of a semantic database. Using technology like the semantic web standard, Linked Data and the corresponding RDF/OWL framework, an Electronic Music production setup and its usage can be encoded, stored, and analyzed

"They're all going out to something weird": workflow, legacy and metadata in the music production process

In this paper we use results from two ethnographic studies of the music production process to examine some key issues regarding how work is currently accomplished in studio production environments. These issues relate in particular to workflows and how metadata is adapted to the specific needs of specific parts of the process. We find that there can be significant tensions between how reasoning is applied to metadata at different stages of production and that this can lead to overheads where metadata has to be either changed or created anew to make the process work. On the basis of these findings we articulate some of the potential solutions we are now examining. These centre in particular upon the notions of Digital/Dynamic Musical Objects and flexible metadata shells

The Internet of Musical Things Ontology

The Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT) is an emerging research area consisting of the extension of the Internet of Things paradigm to the music domain. Interoperability represents a central issue within this domain, where heterogeneous objects dedicated to the production and/or reception of musical content (Musical Things) are envisioned to communicate between each other. This paper proposes an ontology for the representation of the knowledge related to IoMusT ecosystems to facilitate interoperability between Musical Things. There was no previous comprehensive data model for the IoMusT domain, however the new ontology relates to existing ontologies, including the SOSA Ontology for the representation of sensors and actuators and the Music Ontology focusing on the production and consumption of music. This paper documents the design of the ontology and its evaluation with respect to specific requirements gathered from an extensive literature review, which was based on scenarios involving IoMusT stakeholders, such as performers and audience members. The IoMusT Ontology can be accessed at: https://w3id.org/iomust#

Semantic Audio Analysis Utilities and Applications.

PhDExtraction, representation, organisation and application of metadata about audio recordings are in the concern of semantic audio analysis. Our broad interpretation, aligned with recent developments in the field, includes methodological aspects of semantic audio, such as those related to information management, knowledge representation and applications of the extracted information. In particular, we look at how Semantic Web technologies may be used to enhance information management practices in two audio related areas: music informatics and music production. In the first area, we are concerned with music information retrieval (MIR) and related research. We examine how structured data may be used to support reproducibility and provenance of extracted information, and aim to support multi-modality and context adaptation in the analysis. In creative music production, our goals can be summarised as follows: O↵-the-shelf sound editors do not hold appropriately structured information about the edited material, thus human-computer interaction is inefficient. We believe that recent developments in sound analysis and music understanding are capable of bringing about significant improvements in the music production workflow. Providing visual cues related to music structure can serve as an example of intelligent, context-dependent functionality. The central contributions of this work are a Semantic Web ontology for describing recording studios, including a model of technological artefacts used in music production, methodologies for collecting data about music production workflows and describing the work of audio engineers which facilitates capturing their contribution to music production, and finally a framework for creating Web-based applications for automated audio analysis. This has applications demonstrating how Semantic Web technologies and ontologies can facilitate interoperability between music research tools, and the creation of semantic audio software, for instance, for music recommendation, temperament estimation or multi-modal music tutorin