37: The Grateful Dead Concert Explorer

Thomas Wilmering, Florian Thalmann, Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London

Description:

  • Live music events are becoming increasingly central to the music world, due to the unique and physical musical experience delivered to the audience.
  • Music fans have been documenting such events and accumulating artefacts and memorabilia, many of which are now being transferred to public archives and often digitised
  • a web application for the exploration of Grateful Dead concerts through digitised artefacts and audio recordings
  • particular focus is placed on semantic audio analysis and novel functionalities enabled by this technology.
  • combines information collected from existing Web resources and semantic audio analysis results to infer higher-level musical information, allowing users to explore the band’s concert history with an audiovisual experience.
  • Semantic Web Resources include Live Music Archive Linked Data and DBpedia for information about venues, cities, artists, etc.
  • other Web resources include scans of artefacts such as tickets and posters, and setlist and lineup details.

External Links:
Demo prototypes:
https://grateful-dead-live.github.io/
https://grateful-dead-live.github.io/plunderphonics/

Internet Archive Grateful Dead collection:
https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead

(URLs may change depending on outcome from work with Pancentric)

Publications:
Thomas Wilmering, Florian Thalmann, and Mark B. Sandler. 2018. Exploration of Grateful Dead Concerts and Memorabilia. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2018), Monterey, California, USA.

Florian Thalmann, Thomas Wilmering, and Mark B. Sandler. 2018. Cultural Heritage Documentation and Exploration of Live Music Events with Linked Data. Workshop on Semantic Applications for Audio and Music (SAAM 2018), Monterey, California, USA.

Thomas Wilmering, Florian Thalmann, György Fazekas, and Mark B. Sandler. 2017.  Bridging Fan Communities and Facilitating Access to Music Archives through Semantic Audio Applications. Audio Engineering Society Convention 143, New York, New York, USA.

Biographical Notice:
Thomas Wilmering received an MSc in Music Technology at the University of York supported by an AHRC scholarship, and a PhD degree at Queen Mary University of London. He is currently working as a post-doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London focussing on the field of Semantic Web Technologies in the context of music production, Big Data music analysis using feature extraction techniques and Linked Data for music archives.

Florian Thalmann is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London.