Teatro alla Scala - Milan

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Digitisation project for the music archive (audio and scores) of Teatro alla Scala

Although Teatro alla Scala is often associated with operas, concerts, recitals, it is probably not known that it possesses a historical music archive of great significance. It includes three kinds of music media:

• audio recordings;
• video recordings;
• music scores.

For this reason, a panel of international sponsors has funded in 1997 a project for the preservation of this precious music heritage. The scientific direction and the execution of the project has been entrusted to the LIM Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale of the Computer Science Department at the University of Milan.
Audio recording of live performances has kept on with no interruptions since 1951. This activity has produced, in close to five decades, over 5,000 media: analog open reels from 1951 to 1990, DATs from 1991 to 1996, CD-R from 1997, all of which contain the work of the most famous musicians of this century (singers, conductors, performers, etc.). These historical recordings have heterogeneous quality of recording, heterogeneous state of conservation of magnetic media, and a heterogeneous state of the copyright topic.

Video recordings cover approximately the same period, while they were always taken by a single fixed telecamera. So, they are not considered in the current project.

Music scores include:

• handwritten original scores;
• commercially available published scores;
• elaborations of previously published scores; for examples, person-alizations of orchestral scores by conductors (they generally have special directives for dynamics and expression).

Both the first and the third have great historical value. Thousands of these documents are available and need to be preserved, and organized for efficient enjoyment. Furthermore, computer methods allows the Archive to enhance the quality of its products, and reduce the costs of many activities. For example, the printing of transposed parts.

Furthermore, there are thousands of score documents, not yet catalogued by computer, including orchestral scores, working draft scores, single instrument parts, singing-piano reductions used during the rehearsals by the singers, the producer, the choreographer, and so on.

The overall goals of the project are:

• verification and integration of the original Music Archive of Teatro alla Scala;
• definition and experimentation of a methodology for audio tape digitizing;
• optical music recognition of scores;
• symbolic representation of scores (MIDI, NIFF);
• design, implementation, and testing of the multimedia MAIS (Musical Archive Information System) database which includes
  digital audio, symbolic scores, graphic scores, images, texts;
• research about: audio & score data structures, relations, and browsing; methods for segmenting, indexing, and cross retrieving
  by contents for both audio and scores.

Major results are expected in the music audio domain and for the characterization of interactive databases based on music archive media.

Research topics gives some original advanced features such as:

• score archive queries by audio fragments,
• monophonic audio archive queries by audio fragments,
• MIDI archive queries by audio fragments,
• direct control of a 224 CD-ROM juke-box within Oracle8.1 queries,
• integration of audio, MIDI and NIFF data into Oracle8.1 objects.