Information Studies Seminar Series: "The Research Program of the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Laboratory." Guest speaker Dr. I. Fujinaga

Join us for a McGill School of Information Studies (SIS) Seminar Series talk on challenges, opportunities, and research related to digitizing music collections with guest speaker Dr. Ichiro Fujinaga, Associate Professor in the Music Technology Area at the Schulich School of Music. 

ABSTRACT

The main goal of the research program of the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Laboratory is to develop and evaluate practices, frameworks, and tools for the design and construction of worldwide distributed digital music archives and libraries.

Over the last few millennia, humans have amassed an enormous amount of information and cultural material that is scattered around the world. It is becoming abundantly clear that the optimal path for the acquisition of this material is to distribute the task of digitizing the wealth of historical and cultural heritage material that exists in analogue formats, which may include books, manuscripts, music scores, maps, photographs, videos, analogue tapes, and phonograph records. In order to achieve this goal, libraries, museums, and archives throughout the world, large or small, need well-researched policies, proper guidance, and efficient tools to digitize their collections and to make them available economically.

The research conducted within the program addresses unique and imminent challenges posed by the digitization and dissemination of music media. In this talk various projects conducted at our laboratory will be presented; including large-scale optical music recognition, workflow management for automatic metadata extraction of LP recordings, creation of ground truth for structural and chord analysis of music, evaluation of digitization methods for analogue recordings, and digital prosopography of Renaissance musicians.

BIO
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor in the Music Technology Area at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University.  He has Bachelor's degrees in Music/Percussion and Mathematics from University of Alberta and a Master's degree in Music Theory and a Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University. Research interests include music theory, machine learning, music perception, optical music recognition, digital signal processing, genetic algorithms, and music information acquisition, preservation, and retrieval.

This talk is free and open to the public. Please arrive early to secure a seat.