technology

During the last year, music consumption has been confined inside the four walls of individual homes, but at the same time it has expanded with the help of streamed concerts which give access to performances from around the world.

The Finnish National Opera and Ballet has launched an extensive project to integrate cutting-edge technology into the world of art in multiple ways, seeking synergies and tools for new kinds of cooperation and communality in both planning and audience relations. However, the FNOB like most of Finnish society is currently shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All rehearsals and performances have been cancelled for the time being, including the ‘Opera Beyond’ conference and premiere this spring. Obviously the world will change as a result of this crisis, and the art of opera will change too.

"With my teaching this summer, I have found a new and hopeful vista opening before me," writes Kaija Saariaho. This column is part of the series On my music and beyond, where composers and other music makers write about their music.

For many decades, librarians have been compiling catalogues of the melodies or themes of musical works. In such a catalogue it is easy to discover that, e.g., the familiar sequence of musical pitches "G G G Eb" comes from (the starting phrase) of Beethoven's 5th symphony. But what if the theme is not remembered correctly or the excerpt does not occur at the beginning of the phrase? These problems are overcome through automated music identification. Such identification techniques can be used in a query-by-humming system to retrieve musical documents in large digital music databases. But what is the applied methodology in such a system? What kind of databases are featured, and how fast can they perform?