About the Project

 


Term: 2017–2021
Project Lead: Cornelia Szabó-Knotik
Funding: BMWFW, mdw

 

 

Since the beginning of the 20th century sounds and pictures, conveyed through the media, dominate our perception of the world and our surroundings. The digital storage of these sounds and pictures leaves us with gigantic volumes of data. Music and sound are formative for these databases and influence our social relations: they function as a cultural memory of certain groups and individuals, they convey certain feelings and emotions and mark special rituals and (social) events.

The research project Telling Sounds deals with the importance of audio-visual documents for new approaches in the field of musicology. The embedding of music in radio programs, reports, documentaries and films is an indicator of the significance of these documents for a music history that can be observed beyond the grand narrative of the musical “heroes” encountered in cultural centers. The documents in question contain different kinds of music in a variety of contexts: the (audio)visual refers to different times, institutions, events, places, persons and repertoires respectively which in itself questions a linear image of history. Striving to relate such documents beyond the limits of different collections, archives and types, a combination of methods taken from oral history, from media- and film-studies, music analysis and performance studies has to be applied.

One of the main goals of the project is the development of a tool that makes the work with audiovisual clips easier for researchers interested in the analysis of sound and music in certain contexts. The tool in development is called LAMA ("Linked Annotations for Media Analysis") and offers a research enviroment for the collaborativ work with audio(visual) clips. The metadata of digitally available clips from different archives and platforms (Österreichische Mediathek, The Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences or the Archivio Luce) was fed into the database. The medata is not being recorded directly in the database but only referenced. Various additional information about the clip is then fed into the database. Most of this additional information is gained by listening or looking at the audio(visual) clips. This means that information about individuals, places and/or sounds (various types of sounds, musics, noises etc) that are present in the clip as well as how they are present (someone is speaking, someone is producing a sound, the sound is just referenced, background music is playing etc) is getting fed into the database. Additionally a timecode can be added to each entity. The entities (indiviudals, places, sounds etc) are then linked with the corresponding dataset so that it is possible to posetively identify them. This makes it easier to profit from additional semantic data (linked open data) that is linked to the entity. Furthermore, one can distinguish between "objective" entries (who and what can be seen/heard) and "subjective" entries, like implied meanings, connotations and contexts. These meanings, conntoations and contexts can be recorded as "topics", for instance historical time periods, topoi, ideologies, places of remembrance etc. Further information about LAMA can be found here.

In the academic years 2019 to 2021, the mdw is financing a special project Klingende Zeitgeschichte, carried out jointly with the mdw archives, as a measure to promote early stage researchers. The project is dedicated to the media appearance of the mdw and its effects. We would like to welcome the two researchers as members of our team: Eva Schörkhuber and Haruki Noda.

 

Retrospective


LAMA - The clip

The team worked on a clip about the LAMA tool to give an insight into the functionality and potential of LAMA. Watch it here:
 

Contributions (conferences)

Julia Jaklin and Peter Provaznik talked about the Tool LAMA which our team develops at the moment at the conference of the Digital Libraries of Musicology. A first impression of the tool offers the poster from the presentation.

LAMA: Annotating and connecting audio(visual) sources for musicological research and media analysis

 

 

On the 2nd of June Julia Jaklin and Peter Provaznik presented the project Telling Sounds and the tool LAMA at the international conference Data for History. Modelling Times, Places, Agents.


Dates

November 2021

  • LAMA: The Clip

Oktober 2021

  • Presentation "Klingende Zeitgeschichte"
    Eva Schörkhuber and Haruki Noda together with faculty and students of the institutes 01, 07, and 10: three podcasts on MDW's history

July 2021

  • DLfM21 Digital Libraries for Musicology conference (28.–31.7.)
    Poster session: Telling Sounds LAMA: Annotating and Connecting Au-dio(visual) Sources for Musicological Research and Media Analysis

Juni 2021

  • Presentation LAMA (Linked Annotation for Media Analysis) for colleagues and cooperators
  • Julia Jaklin and Peter Provaznik presented LAMA at the conference "Data for History. Modelling Time, Places, Agents" (2.06.21)

Mai 2021

  • Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU)
    Matej Santi: Prilaščanje glasbene kulturne dediščine v ideološke namene (12.5.)

November 2020

  • „Hearing is Believing“: Radio(-Programme) als strategisches Propagandainstrument, Wien (26–28.11.)
    Matej Santi: Jimmy Bergs Interviews aus New York und die Imagination des Österreichischen
    Elias Berner, Julia Jaklin: Die Musik und ihre Kontexte in den Sendern Rot–Weiß–Rot und RAVAG: Das Digitale Analysewerkzeug "Linked Annotations for Media Analysis"
    Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, Kriegsgefangene kehren heim

May 2020 (postponed to the spring of 2021)

January 2020

December 2019

October 2019

  • On October 1 and 2, 2019, the team, together with Stefan Szepe (ZID), outlined the structure of the data model underlying the research tool. David Weigl (IWK) introduced the data model of TROMPA.
  • Workshop: Data Modeling with Franziska Diehr, Free University of Berlin (1.–3.10.)

September 2019

  • Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the German Musicological Society (GfM), Detmold - Paderborn (23.9.)
    Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, Matej Santi, Elias Berner, Peter Provaznik, Julia Jaklin: "Musikgeschichte anders erzählen?"

April 2019

  • Graduate Programm Austrian Studies, University of Innsbruck (1.4.)
    Matej Santi: "Hier spricht Jimmy Berg aus New York", oder vom transnationalen Nation-building im Radio

March 2019

February 2019

  • Science Day MDW (27.2.)
    Poster presentation

January 2019

  • Lecture Tendenzen des Faches (16.1., 9.00–10.30, IMI)
    Team Telling Sounds: Presentation of the researchproject

December 2018

  • Musik Quellen Denken (ÖGMw Jahrestagung)
    Panel M. Santi und E. Berner: Wie klingt die 2. Republik. Oder welche Musik hat wen wovon befreit?

September 2018