Telemeta

Abstract

The audio archives of the CNRS-Musée de l'Homme are among the most important collections of ethnomusicological recordings in Europe. As the number of collections increase and as new audio technologies arise, questions about the best approaches for preserving, archiving and providing public access to these materials have arisen. With this in mind, ethnomusicologists and engineers have joined efforts since 2007 to develop a scalable and collaborative web platform for managing and increasing access to digitized sound archives. This web platform is based on Telemeta, an open-source web audio framework dedicated to digital sound archives. Since 2011, the Telemeta framework has been deployed to hold the platform of the CNRS-Musée de l'Homme's audio archives, which are managed by the Research Center for Ethnomusicology. This framework focuses on facilitating collaboration and user access to audio items and their associated metadata. The architecture of Telemeta relies on TimeSide, an open-source audio processing framework written in Python * This work is partly supported by a grant from the french National Research Agency (ANR) with reference ANR-12-CORD-0022. † This author is also affiliated to PARISSON, 16 rue Jacques Louvel-Tessier, Paris, FRANCE and JavaScript languages, which provides decoding, encoding and streaming capabilities together with a smart embeddable HTML audio player. TimeSide can also produce various automatic annotation, segmentation and musicological analysis that have been developed in the interdisciplinary research project called DIADEMS. Furthermore it includes a set of audio analysis plug-ins and wraps several audio feature extraction libraries. This paper introduces the Telemeta framework and discusses how cutting-edge tools are being implemented that provide new ways to archive and analyze sound libraries.