JazzDAP – New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies: Music Information Retrieval and AI Support for Jazz Scholarship in Digital Archives

A NEH-AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions project

Abstract

New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies uses state of the art music information retrieval and artificial intelligence algorithms for the analysis of jazz recordings and linked data to enable novel approaches to co-creative use of materials in the archival collections of the Institute of Jazz Studies and Scottish Jazz Archive. This trans-Atlantic collaboration between jazz historians, technologists, and jazz archivists will expand access to unique materials held in archives and illuminate their musical relationships to more widely studied recordings. This project will create, analyse, and visualize relationships between audio and other materials and create rich research workflows to be shared within the scholarly community as a novel way to support co-creation with cultural institutions. We envision a disciplinary transformation through the discovery of new models for jazz historiography, and a broader, interdisciplinary transformation in methodology for digital humanities

Investigators

Tillman Weyde (PI UK),  City University of London, UK

Gabriel Solis (PI US), University of Illinois Champaign Urbana, USA

Simon DixonQueen Mary University of London, UK

Haftor Medboe, Edinburgh Napier University, UK

Pedro Cravinho, Birmingham City University, UK

Adriana Cuervo, Rutgers University, USA

Partners

Scottish Jazz Archive, UK

Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

Duration and Funding

The project is an ongoing collaboration between six different universities across four countries, which started in Feb 2021 and is funded until July 2024 by the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions Call (see announcement here) via the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA).