You are here

New ways to index and share sounds on line

Title (author1): 
Ms
First names (author1): 
Josephine
Surname (author 1): 
Simonnot
Institution: 
CNRS, CREL/LESC
Country: 
FRANCE
Other authors: 
Thomas Fillon
Presentation type: 
spoken paper
Date: 
27 Sept Sunday
Start time: 
1 430
Venue: 
Belvedere 2
Abstract: 

“One for all, all for one”, it’s could be the motto of the French National Research Center!
For many years, one of CNRS's objectives is to improve access and facilitate the sharing of digital data in humanities and social sciences for the entire academic community, through a toolbox of open source services and utilities (HumaNum Departement). In anthropology, ethnomusicology and linguistics, researchers work on multiple kinds of documents, including sound recordings. With new internet and digital audio technologies, questions linked to the preservation, the archiving and the availability of these audio materials have arisen together with new possibilities to access, visualize and annotate them in a collaborative manner. Since 2007, French ethnomusicologists and engineers have joined their efforts to develop a collaborative web platform for managing and improving access to such digitized sound archives. This web platform is based on Telemeta, an open-source web audio framework dedicated to digital sound archives and developed through the expertise of the Parisson company. Its architecture is associated with TimeSide, an open-source audio processing engine written in Python and JavaScript languages, which provides multimedia transcoding and analysis capabilities together with a smart embeddable and streamable HTML audio player.
As part of a french interdisciplinary research project called DIADEMS (Description, Indexation, Access to Documents of EthnoMusicology and Sound), various annotation, segmentation and automatic musicological analysis tools have been developed to further extend TimeSide and to provide Telemeta with new capabilities.
The benefits of this collaborative platform for humanities apply to numerous aspects of the field of ethnomusicology, ranging from musical analysis to comparative history and anthropology of music, as well as to the fields of linguistics and acoustics. Some of them have been mentioned in several audio signal processing and ethnomusicological publications.
This paper introduces how cutting-edge tools are being implemented to fit new ways to access and indexing sound libraries. The first results of this experiment carried out in 2014 and tested on the CNRS ethnomusicological sound archives will be presented in this paper. The corresponding softwares are progressively released as open-source to be accessible to the many, as a collective project.
The DIADEMS Team