Dr Kevin Page chairs Digital Libraries for Musicology Conference

70 international researchers attended the 5th conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) in Paris, France, last month. The conference was organised by Centre staff in collaboration with the IReMus centre of the CNRS (Institut de recherche en Musicologie, Centre national de la recherche scientifique).

Dr Kevin Page served as programme and general chair for the conference, working with local chairs Dr Christophe Guillotel-Nothmann and Dr Cécile Davy-Rigaux, CNRS Directrice de recherche. This year DLfM was held at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, France, a world-renowned and ground-breaking centre working at the intersection of music and technology.

The programme showcased research into the application of computational and informatics approaches for the study, analysis, and organisation of digital music, and music-related, corpora. The papers were presented across four themed sessions on Technological Advances, Digital Studies, Recognition and Encoding, and Collections, with the proceedings forming part of the ACM ICPS series and available online with open access.

Oxford e-Research Centre researcher David Lewis presented the paper "Publishing musicology using multimedia digital libraries", co-authored with the Centre's David Weigl and Kevin Page, along with Joanna Bullivant from the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford. The paper describes how the MELD framework was used to create an interactive exhibition on the work of composer Frederick Delius (1862–1934), using Linked Data to combine digital material from the British Library, Delius Trust, and an annotated string quartet performance recorded earlier this year in Oxford. The technical innovations drive an environment for enriched engagement with musical sources and give an insight into the creative process.

The following week this work was also discussed by Page, Lewis, and Bullivant during a panel session with the Music Faculty's Prof. Daniel Grimley at the British Library, as part of "Digital Delius: Unlocking Digitised Music Manuscripts". This sold out public event presented the results of the AHRC-funded Digital Delius project, a collaboration between the Faculty of Music, British Library, and the e-Research Centre, which also created a complete digital catalogue of Delius' works using the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and MerMEId software developed at The Royal Library (National Library of Denmark). The catalogue and digital exhibition were demonstrated to attendees and, after a discussion of their musicological significance and insights into the digital approach, the event concluded with a live performance by the Villiers String Quartet.

The e-Research Centre team would like to thank all their colleagues and collaborators in the Digital Delius project, in particular Amelie Roper from the British Library, and Daniel Grimley and Joanna Bullivant from the Faculty of Music, for organising the event and exhibition.