Digital tools are bringing Europe’s musical history to life – and could even improve your playlist

From the ringing of Italy's medieval bell towers to the influence of French operas on traditional Dutch music, Europe's musical heritage is a rich and interwoven tapestry. But unless this knowledge from the past, and its musical connections to the present, are preserved and made accessible, important elements of our culture could be lost forever.

This was the inspiration behind Polifonia. "We recognised that a lot of material about musical heritage is very hard to find," says coordinator Valentina Presutti, from the University of Bologna in Italy. "Information is often stored in difficult-to-access institutional archives."

Presutti has seen first-hand how easily musical heritage can be lost. When the 2012 earthquake in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region damaged several medieval bell towers, local bell-ringing associations were consulted on the reconstruction work to ensure that this musical tradition was not lost.

"This art form is a huge example of intangible heritage that is not recorded anywhere," adds Presutti. "We wanted to fill this gap, to ensure that this practice was not lost."

Preserving our musical heritage

These objectives set the Polifonia project in motion, and brought together musicologists, computer scientists and cultural experts. The aim was to put in place tools, guidelines and resources that would improve musical heritage preservation for the benefit of academics, students and music enthusiasts.

Polifonia centred on 10 pilot projects. Music-focused pilot projects included charting the history of pipe organs in the Netherlands, and detailing the architecture and playing techniques of bell structures in Italy.

"Part of our work involved collecting audio files of traditional instruments and music," says Presutti. "These were published through the Sound and Vision Institute in the Netherlands. We then launched the Polifonia Song Contest, which encouraged musicians to use these sounds from the past to create modern compositions. This was a great way for musicians to discover and reinvent their musical heritage."

Tools for music history scholars

Other pilot projects focused on building research capacity through computer science. They brought together data on Europe's distributed musical heritage with the aim of making it more accessible. They collected data on topics such as the evolution of melody lines and tonalities over the centuries, and the historical experience of music in childhood and children's engagement with music.

"We developed data sets containing material from many archives. We also developed tools to query these data sets, to help scholars and academics find exactly what they are looking for," explains Presutti, a computer scientist herself who uses the tool in her own classes.

Another Polifonia pilot developed a machine learning technique for finding musical relations between different cultures and periods. "During the pilot, musicologists used this technique to make hypotheses about the origins and evolution of certain Irish folk tunes, which were previously hard to classify," remarks Presutti. "This automated technique could be important for scholars of music history."

Music preservation at scale

The project also set up a portal for scholars and musicians, to provide access to all the digital tools and registries. These registries include links to instruments, music and artists.

The hope is that this portal will become the reference point for this field of study, and will serve as the basis for future musical heritage research.

"I'm currently coordinating a nationally funded project on applying AI, and writing a proposal for a call on cultural heritage," notes Presutti. "Both of these projects will make use of some of Polifonia's results."

There could also be opportunities to commercialise some of these tools. A music streaming company has expressed interest in using some of Polifonia's techniques to improve their service. "There are lots of results that could be used in future," adds Presutti.