Thursday 29 March 2007

MIR Research Project: OMRAS2

I'm fascinated by Omras2. They got an amazing team and 4.5M Euros* 3.7M Euros to spend in the next 3 years. They are extremely interdisciplinary with excellent connections in many directions. And they have very ambitious goals.

They talk about large collections, and with large they mean millions of tracks. They talk about software that will help "you build playlists with songs that you'll love even though you never heard them before".

However, Omras2 is not just about navigation in huge music collections, playlist generation, and music recommendation. One of their main topics is developing tools for music researchers (like musicologists) and even record producers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to achieve their goals. Somehow it just all seems to fit together perfectly.

Of particular interest I also find their project wiki. I’ve never seen such a transparent research project. You’ll find information about their meetings, their work packages, and deliverables.

Btw, talking about great MIR research projects... you might also be interested in SIMAC (2004-2006). The project I’m currently part of will soon make an English version of their website available (and I promise I’ll blog about it).

Oh, in case you have been wondering what Omras2 stands for: Online Music Recognition And Searching. The 2 is in there because it's a successor to the successful Omras project.

* Update: The grant is about 3.7M EUR (about 5M USD) and not 4.5M EUR. Sorry about that. To be precise: it's 2.5M GBP. That's still HUGE. For example, SIMAC (which was the research project with the largest impact on the MIR community in the last years) had a grant of about 3M EUR which was split between 5 partners in 4 different countries. Omras2 is focused mainly on only two research labs, both located in London.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

FWIW, I believe that ISMIR as a whole owes its existence to the original OMRAS project. Not that ISMIR wouldn't have eventually happened, anyway. But it happened when it did, how it did, because of OMRAS.