With the support of the European Commission via the Horizon 2020 programme, the green light has been given to a new project, AudioCommons, which will be coordinated by the Music Technology Group (MTG) led by Xavier Serra, researcher of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF. 

The project consortium is made up of the Centre for Digital Music of Queen Mary University, London and the University of Surrey (UK) and the companies Jamendo, AudioGaming and Waves, leading research institutes in sound and music computing, as well as key players in the business sector. It is scheduled to last three years, starting early 2016.

The aim of AudioCommons is to bring audio content under Creative Commons licence to the creative industries, such as those devoted to video games, film and music, among others.  

As the project coordinator Xavier Serra mentions, “we have noticed that more and more users are uploading to online repositories under Creative Commons licence a significant amount of audio content, including sound effects, music pieces and samples, field recordings, etc.

To this we can add multimedia content originally released under traditional copyright that have now expired and have come into the public domain. We consider them unexplored materials by the creative industry that we can put at their disposal”.

Leaving aside such repositories as Jamendo or Freesound, “all these materials are not properly labelled and therefore difficult for identification by search engines. In addition, the nature of this content from a variety of sources and authors with different levels of expertise, means it is hardly structured or not uniformly structured, which limits the potential for retrieval and reuse”, explains Serra.

AudioCommons Ecosystem and main lines of research

With this project, the MTG aims to promote shared culture of open content and wants to show the potential it has for the culture, entertainment and leisure industries through the promotion of open audio content and the development of technologies that support an ecosystem of content repositories, production tools at the service of users, i.e., an “AudioCommons ecosystem”. Technologies that will enable the reuse of open audio material and facilitate its integration into production workflows in the creative industries.

To achieve these goals the project will put special emphasis on research into intellectual property and business models, the search for audio ontologies for unified audio annotation that allows content retrieval and, finally, into the semantic description of audio content.

Image credits

"The Sounds of Earth Record Cover - GPN-2000-001978" by NASA/JPL - http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001978.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg#/media/File:The_Sounds_of_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg