Holding a tune, and finding it later

Holding a tune, and finding it later

Imagine if Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wasn’t ever recorded because a young Ludwig forgot to jot down the famous notes “Da-da-da duuumm”.

Thanks to advances in technology and research by Professor David Bainbridge, musicians won’t have to worry about forgetting or misplacing that next big hit. Professor Bainbridge, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato, is creating tools that will make a musician’s job of composing, storing retrieving and performing music much easier.

Professor Bainbridge’s background is in Digital Content Management, or ‘digital libraries’. He is the Director of the Greenstone project, the University’s digital library research platform. Greenstone (www.greenstone.org) is open-source, general purpose software that has been used all around the world; from the New York Botanical Society to the Kazakhstan Human Rights Commission.

His work on the project, including collaborations with the United Nations to make the software multilingual, saw the group receive the Namur Award in 2004 for IT development for humanitarian aid, and the KuDos ICT Science Award in 2008.

At a free public lecture on 17 May, Professor Bainbridge will explain his current research on Music Information Retrieval (MIR); using digital libraries to store and retrieve music files. “The MIR field is relatively young, only emerging about 15 years ago as the technology caught up with the desire to store and retrieve large amounts of sheet music, songs and other audio recordings,” he says.

Computer algorithms can be powerful tools to assist people in managing and creating content, but the interfaces need to be user-friendly he says. “That’s where I’m most interested; bringing the two together. In an ideal world, the experience of storing, retrieving and utilising digital music content should be natural and intuitive.”

Professor Bainbridge says many people will be familiar with Shazam, the smartphone app that lets you identify a song you hear playing—one way that MIR research has been applied. “With the MIR tools I’m creating, musicians can record music, store it as complete works, parts or just ideas, then later on, use sophisticated search tools to find the ‘un-named’ recordings with ease and develop them further.”

MIR also lends itself to the world of live performance. Digitised sheet music combined with Optical Music Recognition (OMR) allows a digital library to enhance a user’s interactive experience with sheet music while they are rehearsing or performing a piece. “In other words, imagine the pages turning automatically as the music reaches the end of the page.”

Professor Bainbridge’s Inaugural Professorial Lecture ‘Mozart’s Laptop’ is on Tuesday 17 May at 5.15pm at the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts at the University of Waikato, Gate 1, Knighton Road. The Opus Bar is open from 4.30pm. Inaugural Professorial Lectures are the University’s way of introducing its latest professors to the community and are free and open to the public.

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