A music tradition, being deeply rooted in the society in which it flourishes, can be an excellent gateway to understand a culture and its people. Despite our easy access to vast amounts of music recordings on Internet from around the world, their comprehension is still very difficult. The young discipline of computational musicology can help with this. It is now possible to develop interactive tools to help listeners better understand and appreciate foreign music cultures and this is what we plan to do.

In this project we will build on previous research carried out in the CompMusic project, within which we gathered music corpora of some important non-western music cultures (such as Hindustani, Carnatic, Arab-Andalusian, Turkish makam, and jingju) and we introduced methodologies for their analysis. From that, we will develop interactive tools for bringing closer these musical cultures to a broad audience. Our aim is to promote these tools within a general public, organizing open seminars, workshops, and concerts, in the city of Barcelona. Our ultimate goal is to help build MUSICAL BRIDGES between the communities that conform our contemporary multicultural society.

This research is carried out with the support of RecerCaixa, a programme impulsed by “la Caixa” in collaboration with the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP).