COGITCH

COGITCH stands for COgnition Guided Interoperability beTween Collections of musical Heritage. The name also refers to the ‘cognitive itch’ that is caused by ‘earworms’: fragments of music that you cannot get out of your head, no matter how hard you try. Musical salience and memorability of musical fragments play an important role in COGITCH.

In COGITCH valuable collections of music will be made interoperable and researched. These are the Dutch folk songs from the Dutch Song Database of the Meertens Institute, especially the field recordings known as “Onder de groene linde”, and early recordings of Dutch popular music from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The interoperability will enable musicological research into the evolution of song culture. Three important issues that COGITCH will address are:

1) the creation of an infrastructure, the ITCH locator, that will allow listeners to annotate fragments they find salient or memorable in the music, and the study of these annotations to discover the underlying musical features
2)researching computational methods for automatically locating and comparing musically salient fragments
3)to design and implement an interoperable infrastructure for searching the musical content of the collections.

The CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) supports COGITCH’s three full-time researchers:

J. Ashley Burgoyne (postdoc, University of Amsterdam)
Dimitrios Bountouridis (scientific programmer, Utrecht University)
Jan Van Balen (PhD researcher, Utrecht University)

The other team members are:

Remco Veltkamp (Utrecht University, principal investigator)
Louis Grijp (Meertens Institute, co-project leader)
Henkjan Honing (University of Amsterdam, co-project leader)
Maarten Brinkerink (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
Martine de Bruin (Meertens Institute)
Esther Herder (Radio 5 Nostalgia)
Peter van Kranenburg (Meertens Institute)
Johan Oomen (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
Anja Volk (Utrecht University)
Frans Wiering (Utrecht University)

You can now play a beta version of the Web Hooked! here. Keep in mind that Deezer account is required and that it doesn't support mobile devices.