Music’s changing fast, FAST is changing music. Our FAST documentation film is now available to watch (click on one of the two links below):

Full film VIMEO: https://player.vimeo.com/video/307448834
Full film YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/VF4qQRcGfl8

Filmed at various locations, including the legendary Abbey Road Studio, the short film tells the FAST story. Listen to Mark Sandler (FAST Principal Investigator), David de Roure (Oxford Co-investigator), Steve Benford (Nottingham Co-investigator) and Josh Reiss (Queen Mary Co-investigator) speak. Also speaking are Mark d’Inverno (FAST Advisory Board chair), pianist and composer Maria Kallionpää, and artist, composer and researcher Tracy Redhead. With background music by Tracy Redhead (also featured on our FAST LP).

More information about the FAST industry Day:

FAST Industry Day

Showcasing the culmination of five years of digital music research, the FAST IMPACt project (Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption), led by Queen Mary University of London, hosted an invite-only industry day at Abbey Road Studios on the 25th October.

You can read our press release in full here.

Seventy international researchers attended the 5th conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) in Paris, France, organised by the FAST project in collaboration with the Unlocking Musicology project and the IReMus centre of the CNRS (Institut de recherche en Musicologie, Centre national de la recherche scientifique).

Dr Kevin Page, senior researcher at FAST partner the University of Oxford, served as programme and general chair for the conference, working with local chairs Dr Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann and Dr Cécile Davy-Rigaux, CNRS Directrice de recherche. This year DLfM was held at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, France, a world-renowned and ground-breaking centre working at the intersection of music and technology.

The programme showcased research into the application of computational and informatics approaches for the study, analysis, and organisation of digital music, and music-related, corpora. The papers were presented across four themed sessions on Technological Advances, Digital Studies, Recognition and Encoding, and Collections, with the proceedings forming part of the ACM ICPS series and available online with open access.

The FAST project’s MELD framework featured in a paper at the conference, co-authored by FAST team member and MELD lead developer David Weigl, alongside colleagues from the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and Faculty of Music. The paper describes how MELD was used to create an interactive exhibition on the work of composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934), using Linked Data to combine digital material from the British Library, Delius Trust, and an annotated string quartet performance recorded earlier this year in Oxford. The technical innovations drive an environment for enriched engagement with musical sources and give an insight into the creative process.

Introduction by Professor Mark d’Inverno

Music’s changing fast: FAST is changing music. Showcasing the culmination of five years of digital music research, the FAST IMPACt project (Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption) led by Queen Mary University of London hosted an invite only industry day at Abbey Road Studios on Thursday 25 October, 2 – 8 pm. Presented by Professor Mark Sandler, Director of the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, the event showcased to artists, journalists and industry professionals the next generation technologies that will shape the music industry – from production to consumption.

Professor Mark Sandler introducing FAST

FAST is looking at how new technologies can positively disrupt the recorded music industry. Research from across the project was presented to the audience, with work from partners at the University Nottingham and the University of Oxford presented alongside that from Queen Mary. The aim being that by the end of the FAST Industry day, people would gain some idea how AI and the Semantic Web can couple with Signal Processing to overturn conventional ways to produce and consume music. Along the way, industry attendees were able to preview some cool and interesting new ideas, apps and technology that the FAST team showcased.

Panel session members

One hundred and twenty (120) attendees were treated to an afternoon and evening of talks demonstrations, the Climb! performance, and an expert panel discussion with Jon Eaves (The Rattle), Paul Sanders (state51), Peter Langley (Origin UK), Tracy Redhead (award-winning musician, composer and interactive producer, University of Newcastle, Australia), Maria Kallionpää (composer and pianist, Hong Kong Baptist University) and Mark d’Inverno (Goldsmiths) who chaired the panel. Rivka Gottlieb, harpist and music therapist, performed some musical pieces based on her collaboration with PI David de Roure and the project ‘Numbers into Notes’, Oxford e-Research Centre, throughout the day. Oxford e-Research Centre, throughout the day. Other speakers included George Fazekas who outlined the Audio Commons Initiative, Tracy Redhead and Florian Thalmann who presented their work on the semantic player technologies and Ben White who spoke about the Open Music Archive project (exploring the intersection betweeen art, music and archives).

The FAST Industry Day was opened by Lord Tim Clement-Jones (Chair of Council, Queen Mary University of London) and was compered by Professor Mark d’Inverno (Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths College, London).

Below are some highlights:

Carolan Guitar: Connecting Digital to the Physical – The Carolan Guitar tells its own story. Play the guitar, contribute to its history, scan its decorative patterns and discover its story. Carolan uses a unique visual marker technology that enables the physical instrument to link to the places it’s been, the people who’ve played it and the songs it’s sung, and deep learning techniques to better event detection. https://carolanguitar.com

FAST DJ – Fast DJ is a web-based automatic DJ system and plugin that can be embedded into any website. It generates transitions between any pair of successive songs and uses machine learning to adapt to the user’s taste via simple interactive decisions.

Grateful Dead Concert Explorer – A Web service for the exploration of recordings of Grateful Dead concerts, drawing its information from various Web sources. It demonstrates how Semantic Audio and Linked Data technologies can produce an improved user experience for browsing and exploring music collections.  See Thomas Wilmering explaining more about the Grateful Dead Concert explorer: https://vimeo.com/297974486

Jam with Jamendo – Jam with Jamendo brings music learners and unsigned artists together by recommending suitable songs as new and varied practice material. In this web app, users are presented with a list of songs based on their selection of chords. They can then play along with the chord transcriptions or use the audio as backing tracks for solos and improvisations. Using AI-generated transcriptions makes it trivial to grow the underlying music catalogue without human effort. See Johan Pauwels explaining more about Jam with Jamendo: https://vimeo.com/297981584

MusicLynx – a web platform for music discovery that collects information and reveals connections between artists from a range of online sources. The information is used to build a network that users can explore to discover new artists and how they are linked together.

The SOFA Ontological Fragment Assembler – enables the combination of musical fragments – Digital Music Objects, or DMOs – into compositions, using semantic annotations to suggest compatible choices.

Numbers into Notes – experiments in algorithmic composition and the relationship between humans, machines, algorithms and creativity. See David de Roure explaining more about the research: https://vimeo.com/297989936

rCALMA Environment for Live Music Data Science – a big data visualisation of key in the Live Music Archive using Linked Data to combine programmes and audio feature analysis. See David Weigl talking about rCALMA: https://vimeo.com/297970119

Climb! Performance Archive – Climb! is a non-linear composition for Disklavier piano and electronics. This web-based archive creates a richly indexed and navigable archive of every performance of the work, allowing audiences and performers to engage with the work in new ways.

The FAST project brings together labs from three UK’s top Universities: Queen Mary¹s Centre for Digital Music, University of Nottingham¹s Mixed Reality Lab and the University of Oxford¹s e-Research Centre.

More about the FAST Industry Day:
https://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/events/fast-industry-day

Full list of FAST demonstrators:
https://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/demonstrators/

News item on Audio Commons demonstrators at the FAST industry day:
https://www.audiocommons.org/2018/10/23/abbey-road-industry.html

Research in the FAST project and several other projects has demonstrated a new way to perform sound design. High quality, artistic sound effects can be achieved by the use of lightweight and versatile sound synthesis models. Such models do not rely on stored samples, and provide a rich range of sounds that can be shaped at the point of creation.

This system is now live at https://fxive.com (requires the Chrome browser), a web platform for sound effect synthesis. On July 25^th, Prof. Josh Reiss and collaborators co-founded the company FXive to commercialise the technology. FXive is now seeking investment and working towards a full commercial launch. FXive will be demonstrated at the FAST Industry Day.

Oxford FAST team members who are researchers at the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre, have announced version 1.0 of their Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework, a flexible software platform for research which combines digital representations of music – such as audio and notation – with contextual and interpretive knowledge in the Semantic Web. 

The release of MELD represents a significant milestone in the Centre’s activities in the £5m EPSRC-funded Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST) project, a collaboration with Queen Mary University of London and the University of Nottingham.

“MELD brings an innovative new model for combining multimedia music resources, moving beyond milliseconds and simple labels to capture meaningful associations derived from music theory” explains Senior Researcher Kevin Page, who leads the FAST Music Flows activity and MELD research within the Centre. Dr Page, a member of the group which produced the W3C Linked Data Platform (LDP) specification, adds “by extending standards including LDP, Web Annotations, and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), MELD provides a flexible, scaleable, core while simultaneously enabling the detailed application-specific customisations researchers and industry find valuable”.

Dr David Weigl, principal developer of the MELD framework, recounts that “what’s been fascinating and rewarding is the variety of research we’ve worked on. We’ve effectively created a new instrument to perform a contemporary piece of music, analysed how musicians rehearse and perform, and are now building an interface to explore historical catalogues in the British Library. It really highlights the adaptability of our approach”.

“Climb!”, a non-linear composition for Disklavier piano and electronics by Maria Kallionpää (pictured), is an example of one such application. The performance environment for Climb! was built by Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab in collaboration with the Oxford FAST team, and combines their Muzicodes software with MELD. Climb! will receive its next performance during our FAST Industry Day at the world famous Abbey Road Studios, where Oxford researchers will be on hand to demonstrate and explain their innovations to artists, journalists and industry professionals.

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In collaboration with colleagues from the Faculty of Music, MELD will also play a supporting role at the forthcoming Digital Delius: Unlocking Digitised Music Manuscripts event at the British Library. It is the technical foundation for an experimental digital exhibition presenting scores and sketches, early recordings, photographs, and concert programmes showcasing the music of British-born composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934). The materials are complemented by expert commentary and an interactive MELD application which situates the role of the items within the creative process.

This was also the theme of a workshop earlier in the year, when Centre researcher David Lewis (pictured above) used MELD to record the performance adaptations made by a student ensemble under the tutelage of the Villiers Quartet.

Professor David De Roure, Oxford FAST Investigator, summarises: “In MELD, we’ve created an implementation of Digital Music Objects, or DMOs. This next generation technology realises the FAST research vision for end-to-end semantics across all stages of the music lifecycle, bringing fantastic creative opportunities to artists, the music industry and consumers.”

MELD is open source and available from github.

News Source: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/centre-releases-music-encoding-software (13 Sept 2018)