The Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland is undertaking efforts together with academic partners and researchers to keep its musical heritage spanning over five decades alive and catapulting it into the digital era.
MONTREUX, Switzerland, July 13 (Xinhua) -- The Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, famous for its legendary live music performances, is undertaking efforts together with academic partners and researchers to keep its musical heritage spanning over five decades alive and catapulting it into the digital era.
Alain Dufaux, executive director of the Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC) at the world-renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) told Xinhua that digitizing and preserving the audio-visual collections and adding value were a top priority.
In partnership with the Claude Nobs Foundation and other sponsors, EPFL is in charge of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project to digitize and enrich the collection of the recordings and safeguard its long-term preservation.
"EPFL is digitizing the archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival in collaboration with the Claude Nobs Foundation. We set up the project already 15 years ago," Dufaux said.
According to the Claude Nobs Foundation, more than 5,000 concerts have so far been recorded -- totaling more than 11,000 hours of video and 6,000 hours of audio -- and 200,000 professional photographs have been digitized.
Swiss music promoter Claude Nobs who died in 2013 founded the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967, and built it into an international festival and events platform for music lovers.
The foundation oversees the curation and conservation of Claude Nobs' audio and visual archives, which are one of the world's largest collections of live music recordings, and all of which were recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival since its inception.
"Nowadays, with AI we can do a lot of things such as finding the solo performances in the collection, where we have a guitar, how to enhance the quality of the videos," Dufaux commented.
"This year, together with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in Paris, we have started to create new performances from the archive, involving AI co-creations. Such actions are organized by the Living Archive Research Group, a joint program driven by the School of Design and Art School of Valais (EDHEA), the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences of the University of Geneva (CISA), EPFL CHC, and the Artists in Lab program from the Zurich University of the Arts."
In 2013, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) inscribed the Montreux Jazz Festival audio and visual collection in its international Memory of the World Register, the documentary equivalent of "World Heritage."
"We are trying to connect instruments and musicians to the memory of the Montreux Jazz Festival, using artificial intelligence and numeric tools for interactive and generative purposes," Dr. Christophe Fellay, head of the Sound Department at EDHEA, told Xinhua.
The 57th Montreux Jazz Festival from June 30 to July 15 drew 250,000 spectators to the shores of Lake of Geneva.
Asked about a potential collaboration with Chinese AI experts and musicology researchers, Fellay said: "We can have partners in China, and of course, we can develop collaborations at the university level, that would be great."
Didier Grandjean, a professor at CISA, said: "We don't have a specific project with the Chinese at the moment."
"In the past, we did specific projects in China on the relationship between affection and emotion, and developed a model for China, India, the U.S., and many countries around the world." ■
