Dr. Lubomir Kavaldjiev, Associated Professor at
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences – Institute for Art Studies
Digitalization of the Bulgarian folk music and its presentation on the Internet
This presentation is based on our more than 15 years experience in the digital rewriting, manipulations and creation of music and the representation of the received results locally
and in a computer networks, includingly on the Internet.
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies
Section: INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN MUSICAL CULTURE
and its Web-orientated multimedia databases presented worldwide today on
INTERNET
You can see here some of the results from our work in the last 10 years on Internet address:
http://musicart.imbm.bas.bg
It is the BULGARIAN ACADEMIC MUSIC PORTAL created in 2003 in Institute of Art Studies and fully
available since mart 2004BAMP
Here are some “screens to video” capture records. You can see how
everyone can easily navigate and search in
the Bulgarian Academic Musical Portal.
Video Clip
Buenek dance
Djamal na Nova godina
Video ClipOverview
Video Clip
We have started working on the audio digitalization at the Institute of Art Studies in the early 90s of the 20-th century. In our first attempts we have used very primitive means (under operating system DOS, an 8-bit soundcard and software designed by Bulgarian programmers - amateur).
Because of the humanitarian orientation of the
Institute, the attitude to our work was not appropriate and we have no technical experts.
On the other hand there was a priceless and quite big records collection of authentic Bulgarian folklore (that is to say, folk music untouched by any modern composers). More than 170000 records have been created for the last 75 years. The records are on different types of storage: “soft” shellack records, vinyl records, magnetic tapes, Umatic video cassettes.
All of them were in bad condition and needed urgent restoration and re-recording. But we haven’t any money and technical experts in audio and recording. The only solution was to transfer the most valuable records to PC and to process the sound (noise reduction, spectral correction, normalization etc.)
I’m not folklore researcher (ethno-musicologist). I am
specialist in music theory (systematic and cognitive musicology, aesthetics, psychology), as well as in electronic music. I have created a lot of compositions in this sphere since 1985; some of them are in a folk-electronic style. The music that you can listen in the beginning and as a background on the slides is based on my electronic compositions. I am a FEM founder and one of its organizers. (link to FEM homepage)
This is the first electronic and computer music festival in Bulgaria (Gotze Delchev 1989), which has already gone through 13 performances till 2002. I also made the first 35-minutes television Bulgarian film Underground mysteries in 1988.
These activities and the established contacts
helped me a lot in my work on the collection of folk music for the Institute of Art Studies.
In 1992 I have already had some main scientific objectives:
-Digitalization of the collection and computer processing of the obtained audio results, as well as their storage on CD’s.
-Cataloguing of the huge mass of text information connected with this collection, effective means for data input by operators who are humanitarian experts (folklore educated) and creating of computer applications for search.
-To make the results from the 2 activities above accessible by the means of electronic publications on the Internet or on CD-s.
Nowadays, 12 years later I can be satisfied because these objectives were successfully achieved to a greater degree.
The first multimedia
database for musical folklore started to work already in 1993 with operating system MAGIC in DOS, but which has Windows shell. The next year we have already had a short extract from it on the Internet
After this internet orientated base
made an impression In Bulgaria and abroad as the first base of this kind in Europe and it was world acknowledged and it received an award from the GIP-competition (organized with the support of G-7, the European commission and Japan) in 1997.
(GIP = The Global Inventory Project is a G7 Pilot Project coordinated by the European Commission and Japan.)
PROJECT DETAILS
Summary
As a result next year we have been financed by a the foundation Open Society .
The base was converted to MS Access.
The local application was put into practice with DELFI
programming, and by ASP scripts it was possible multimedia pages to be made dynamically generated on a customer request. A year later we were financed in addition by the same foundation for semi-automatic English translation development (we made a thesaurus with folklore terminology) and transcription of the rest of the texts data by international standard Cyrillic/Latin. In this way the Web data were generated bilingual. Such is our base today as you have seen in the beginning of our presentation.
In 2003, with the help of the Bulgarian Culture National Fund, we have developed the project.
The BULGARIAN ACADEMIC MUSIC PORTAL was found which already includes:
-The music publications Database of Institute’s associates -an electronic edition of a magazine "Bulgarsko muzikoznanie"
(Bulgarian Musicology)-quarterly, online version & archive (which shows issues’ summaries and contents )
-The Database for music performance. It is multimedia too, but at that moment the audio is not enough, because of the lack of money for technical equipments and specialists for recording original performances from the professional players. Of course, the Multimedia database for authentic Bulgarian musical folklore mentioned above was integrated here.
BAMP
I have to call your attention to other two
problems that haven’t been solved yet. They concern not only our collections, but all digital collections of musical audio information at all.
The first one concerns the way of database organizing and searching. This task is very difficult when you work with so huge mass of integrated text, audio, video and graphic information (In general we work with scanned music texts which are music decodes hand - written, like pages from musical score).
The factual material can be catalogued easily in alphabetical order, by names, years and so on. But databases concerned with clear musicology and culturology require strong and undoubted system of organization, which is accessible and easy understandable from the user without any special musical education. It demands wide known terms databases about genres and cultural functions. We are planning a project which will show in the WEB space glossary of the common – using musical terms in Bulgaria and some other words, concerned with the whole musical and cultural practice, includingly the newest achievements
So far we mainly based on traditional experience in
the musical theory and ethno – musicology, and also some, created by me cognitive models (synchronous and diachronous) for description of universal recursive relations in the musical culture.
Especially this kind of models is TIEM for basic
functions of the Art from the point of view of its user:
In the folk base – in one of many systems for searching is
exactly used this model, where the magic (ritual) function is divided into two parts. This is due to the specificity of the folklore rituals – customs based on concrete events (weddings, births, funerals and so on) and other activities which are annual. The Traditional (the day's routine) function is divided into two parts too.
In a different way this model was used in our
Database for music performance. Moreover, it integrates the search devices, more of them created by me.
(Article)
What I mean is that so far everyone who is searching a song has to know the name of the author, or the name of the singer, the concrete song and sometime even the name of the file (usually in MP3 format).
For example, most of the users of our folk database are Bulgarian emigrants, who are home – sick or foreigners who knows some Bulgarian song by ear and try to search it in this way, from our site or from somewhere else.
Up to now it is not possible to satisfy such order for information from distance. This would be possible only if they (he or she) are in contact with a specialist – musician in front of whom the user could perform the melody and the specialist, if he knows it could tell them the right name and the place where it could be found. Often the musical specialist knows the melody if he work in the same genre but he doesn’t want to share the sources from where it is possible to be found via Internet for free or even by paid access.
Another important problem is called by me
“the second degree of digitalization”
on musical audio objects.
As far as I know, this problem about the systems for musical searching is not solved worldwide too.
At the same time, we are offering free internet
access to more than 10 000 records of this kind. But, we cannot offer search by singing a melody. So far our search devices are text orientated or are working with indexes describing presents of audio multimedia or video-file, integrated to right info – card for every object in bases.
But the sing – search is possible, too. This is not only theory. It could be done with
software applications which already exist and we are doing it manual.
Maybe somebody was impressed by complex searching in our database about folklore, where there is a field of MIDI. Now, however, if it is searched by this parameter the database answers that there are no existing records.
The MIDI protocol actually can be compared to electronic score. It is
remarkable approximation of the music audio. MIDI shows in a simple numerical data almost everything which happens in music and in this means that it follow the conventions of the writing down in musical notes which add some things which can not be written in notes in traditional way and which are described in score with words and special signs (about temp, slow change of pitch, dynamic and so on). The MIDI protocol is used in electronic music still from “analogous” period of synthesizers for realization on connection between sound databases and synchronous playing in a group. Today it is wide used in music, in computer audio and video techniques, as in a light spectacular DJ’s shows and in many other places.
All songs in a collection can be converted in
MIDI files. If one performed song can be converted in MIDI
file the pitches and rhythm can be easily extracted from that MIDI song and can be presented with numerical strings. The same can be done with received from the user audio file where he is trying to sing the melody looking for.
Then the strings are compared on interval relations between notes with all in database of MIDI converted melodies and we see on a list roll coincidences probability degree. The user has also a possibility for trial hearing of all found in this way audio examples. In this way the user may decide which one is the melody looking for. But the difference is that now it is not necessary to download thousand records from Internet and to listen all them. Now, the search is reduced to some records, sometime to only one.
With that task the search by singing the melody is solved as a
scientific problem for us. We would like to underline once again that till now we don’t know such search engines for popular music in the world, nevertheless of the enormous searching especially of music (MP3) in the last decade.
At the end of my presentation I will demonstrate exactly the same converting. I will convert a folk song from our database into MIDI file. The same song has a music transcription that was done at the time of recording by the explorer ethno musicologist. As a result we can compare: 1.the original audio recorded performance with 2.the ear decoded performance written in notes by a specialist and 3.with the
MIDI decoded generated in the computer.
Video Clip
Video Clip
•
From now on, there is only one step to solve the big problem with automatic searching by melody. In the Institute of Art Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences we are sure that we can solve successfully this problem in collaboration with colleagues from European Union and other countries. Of course, we need sponsorship and proposals to our future projects.
We hope that cultural integration of explorers from different scientific fields and countries will help to achieve useful final results. But, it will be better if we could solve successfully advanced problems and if we work perspective fields
