Special Event: Norwegian Folk Music & Computational Analysis

As a prélude for Norway's Constitution Day, this special event celebrated the Norwegian folk music tradition, showcasing our new online archive and demonstrating the richness of Hardanger fiddle music, with live performance. One aim of the project is to conceive new technologies allowing to better access, understand and appreciate Norwegian folk music.

In this event, we introduced a new online version of the Norwegian Folk Music Archive and discuss underlying theoretical and technical challenges. A live concert/workshop, with the participation of Olav Lukseng?rd Mjelva, offered a lively introduction to Hardanger fiddle music and its elaborate rhythm. The interests and challenges of automated transcription and analysis were discussed, with the public release of our new software Annotemus.

The symposium was organised in the context of the MIRAGE project (RITMO, in collaboration with the National Library of Norway's Digital Humanities Laboratory).

Programme

Click on a title to read the corresponding abstract.

10:00 Welcome, by Ingrid Romarheim Haugen (National Library of Norway) and Alexander Refsum Jensenius (RITMO, University of Oslo)
10:10 Overview of the MIRAGE project Olivier Lartillot
10:30 Presentation of the Norwegian Collection of Folk Music Hans-Hinrich Thedens
  Segmentation of the collection into tunes, the AudioSegmentor software OL, HHT and Rasmus Kjorstad
11:30 Break (light buffet)  
12:00 Introduction to Hardanger fiddle (with live performance) Olav Lukseng?rd Mjelva
  Manual note transcription (of Hardanger fiddle music in particular), the Annotemus software
(with the participation of Olav Lukseng?rd Mjelva)
OL (with Anders Elowsson)
  Automated note transcription (of Hardanger fiddle music) Lars Monstad and OL
13:15 Break  
13:35 Rhythm in Hardanger fiddle music
(with live performance by Olav Lukseng?rd Mjelva)
Mats S. Johansson
  Automated rhythm transcription OL and MSJ
  Music analysis, visualisation; browsing into the music catalogue OL
14:45 Discussion, closing  
15:00 End of program  

Bios

Olav Lukseng?rd Mjelva comes from R?ros in the S?r-Tr?ndelag region of Norway.
He is a founding member of Norwegian/Swedish ensemble SVER, Lodestar Trio, The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, and also the duo Rydvall/Mjelva alongside Swedish Nykleharpa player Erik Rydvall with whom they have received several awards. He is also in Frikar, Copper City Ramblers and several other projects. In 2010 Olav received the prestigious Spelemannprisen, the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy award for his debut solo album and in 2011 he received the prize as part of the Unni Boksasp Ensemble. In 2013 he was also awarded the title of ?Norway’s folk musician of the year?. He has also won the national championship ?Landskappleiken? on hardanger fiddle, and he was also the first to win the Nordic championship in 2009.
Olav is highly sought after as a studio musician and has played on over 50 releases. He is also a widely used instructor and dance musician both in Norway and abroad.
He runs his own recording studio and have the past years recorded a lot for movies, TV and computer games, for instance the Marvel series ?Loki? (2021) and the Lord of the Rings – the Rings of Power (2022).

Olivier Lartillot is a researcher at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, at the University of Oslo, working in the fields of computational music and sound analysis and artificial intelligence. He designed MIRtoolbox, a recognised tool for music feature extraction from audio. He also works on symbolic music analysis, notably on sequential pattern mining. In the context of his 5-year Academy of Finland research fellowship, he conceived the MiningSuite, an analytical framework that combines audio and symbolic research. He is the Principal Investigator of the MIRAGE project.

Hans-Hinrich Thedens is a research librarian at Norway’s National Library’s music section where his responsibility is the Norwegian collection of folk music, a sound archive of field recordings. He was trained as an ethnomusicologist with degrees from the Universities of Hamburg and Oslo. He has published on Norwegian traditional music, music revival movements, folk music festivals and musical instruments and has led the research project on Forms of musical expression among the traveling people of Norway funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Mats Johansson is professor of musicology at the Department of Traditional Arts and Traditional Music, University of South-Eastern Norway. His research interests and publication record span several areas, including rhythmic performance and microrhythm; improvisation; musical learning and embodiment; participatory culture; representations of gender in musical performance; and authorship, copyrights and cultural ownership.

Lars Monstad is a music educator, researcher, and Cultural Manager at Backstage Musikkskole. He holds a Master's degree in Musicology, with a focus on music technology and artificial intelligence, and has experience as a music teacher and music producer. Lars has worked on various projects, including the creation of AI-Music for the Research Council of Norway and the MIRAGE project Lars has also used AI in the process of producing music for several high-profile productions, including the Netflix series "A Storm for Christmas" (2022) and "Julestjerna" on TV2 (2021).

Contact

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Olivier Lartillot.

Organizer

MIRAGE, National Library and RITMO
Published Feb. 20, 2023 3:20 PM - Last modified Aug. 24, 2023 3:22 PM