The Montreux Jazz Digital Project
Montreux Jazz Festival Archive
“It’s the most important testimonial to the history of music covering Jazz, Blues and Rock.”
These are the words that Quincy Jones uttered to the press from his New York studio during the presentation of the preservation project for one the world’s most important audio-visual patrimony of 20th century music. The collection created throughout the 49 years of the Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF) by its founder Claude Nobs, brings together the greatest artists of that period. The archive was officially recognized and is now inscribed in the 2013 UNESCO memory of the world register. From Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Phil Collins to David Bowie and Prince, over 5,000 hours of ‘live’ concerts were recorded in video and audio (a large part of which as multi-tracks) which were also visually depicted by tens of thousands of photos.
Montreux Jazz Digital Project
All the media collection is currently being digitized at EPFL as part of the "Montreux Jazz Digital Project", a collaboration between the engineering school in Lausanne and the newly born “Claude Nobs Foundation” responsible for overseeing the preservation of the Montreux Jazz Festival audio-visual archive. The Montreux Jazz Digital Project aims to preserve and transform this heritage into a unique archive of "raw material" for researchers to innovate in the field of music technology, signal processing, acoustics, multimedia, design and even architecture. Adding value to the collection is at the centre of the project. The newest database and storage technologies are used to provide flexible access to the data. A substantial annotation and metadata enrichment program will be devised for schools, musicians and musicologists, making use of new data mining methods and music information retrieval algorithms. Innovative user-interaction tools are being developed and will be placed at the archive’s disposal to transform it into a living collection.
A new building is under construction on the EPFL campus, one of its pavilions will include a “Montreux Jazz Café”, an innovation space where the public will be able to discover the technologies developed to navigate into the recordings of Montreux in interactive, creative, and immersive ways.
More information: http://metamedia.epfl.ch