Bringing cultural archives to life – the Montreux Jazz Digital Project

Though the word ‘archive’ often connotes endless shelves of undisturbed books or film canisters, modern digitization techniques have made cultural archives more accessible as data sources driving research and education. But members of the Living Archive Research Group, which includes EPFL’s Cultural Heritage and Innovation Center (CHC), see even greater potential in cultural archives: they want to harness the power of these data in the name of creativity.

“The Living Archive Research Group is interested in using archives to create new performances and artistic compositions, and to study the impact of such creations on the public,” explains CHC Operational Director Alain Dufaux. “The CHC’s role is to provide archives to valorize them, not only through technology or the social and human sciences, but through artistic creation itself.”

Together with colleagues Christophe Fellay of the Valais School of Art (EDHEA); Didier Grandjean and Carole Varone of the University of Geneva’s Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA); and Irene Hediger from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdk); Dufaux is working to develop novel creative and artistic experiences driven by the priceless data contained in cultural archives – from recordings of decades of performances at the Montreux Jazz and Verbier Festivals, to the personal audiovisual collections of Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier.

The research group recently organized a workshop entitled “Archives, A Material for Emotions?” presenting the work of the Living Archive Research Group at this year’s Montreux Jazz Festival. Participants were immersed in a high-resolution acoustic environment while they listened to some of the 5,000 festival recordings preserved as part of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project; a collection that is listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register and supported by the Claude Nobs Foundation as well as the CHC. Participants’ emotions and feelings were recorded as they listened, and the results will be presented and discussed by members of the research group. The workshop follows Montreux Sonic Choreography, which the research group organized at the festival’s 2021 edition.

For a deeper investigation into the relationship between music and emotions, the group is launching a larger study in collaboration with University of Lausanne professor Davide Picca. The researchers aim to evaluate emotions perceived by Montreux Jazz Festival audience members following a live concert, and then compare them to emotions experienced while discovering concert recordings on different types of platforms, including immersive installations.

A new role for archives

The researchers believe that with the development of digital methods in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and data science, academics and artists alike have a unique opportunity to rethink and reinvent the role of archives as spaces for public engagement with culture, as well as data sources for new forms of artistic creation.

For example, the CHC is currently working with the College of Humanities Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), led by Sarah Kenderdine, as part of a new Sinergia-funded research project that aims to create an immersive platform for displaying archives to the public. This platform will facilitate interactive participation by audience members as well as the integration of musical improvisations by live musicians. The eM+ will also integrate Nicollier’s archives, digitized by the CHC, into the upcoming Cosmos Archaeology exhibition. To be held in September at EPFL Pavilions, the exhibition will use virtual reality and exabyte-sized astronomical datasets to “reveal the Cosmos as a moving living structure”.

Fellay, Grandjean and Dufaux also foresee future projects using new compositions and artistic creations to fill gaps in collections like the Montreux Jazz archive; creating pieces using artificial intelligence; creating performances allowing audiences to virtually participate by adding their own musical elements; and analyzing the emotions of audiences and musicians resulting from such experiences.

Dufaux notes that a paradigm shift is anticipated in the music industry as well as in study of cultural archives, especially in the wake of the pandemic and in the context of evolving technologies like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and the metaverse. “One of our main goals is to reflect on the form that the production of musical archives should take in the future, based on the needs of artists and the public,” he says.

Author: Celia Luterbacher
Source: EPFL, July 2022

The treasured Montreux Jazz Festival

With its new multimedia platform, the Montreux Jazz Festival provides free and unfettered access to this treasure, as well as to a series of videos that Montreux Jazz TV began producing in 1991. Navigating between video and audio recordings, photos and articles is simple and intuitive. In addition, several layers of information are provided on the artists and the concerts. Music lovers can select from among the highlighted artists and news articles, or use the search engine to find what they want. The database also contains lineups and set lists since 1967. But for Alain Dufaux, the head of the Metamedia Center, the work is not over: “We need to make sure the archives are actively used and to secure funding so they will remain freely accessible for decades, especially for researchers.” The Claude Nobs Foundation, which was recently set up for the purpose of safeguarding this heritage, will contribute to these efforts.
This fall, the Montreux Jazz Café will open on the EPFL campus and give the public a chance to experience EPFL’s latest technological innovations in the area of music and multimedia through these archives.

The EPFL Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center

1. Digitize and preserve audiovisual collections and heritages of major importance in Switzerland or all accross the world
2. Enrich and add value to such collections, organizing research and innovation projects with EPFL laboratories, start-ups, and partners

When digitized, the collections are turned into Research Infrastructures. They become a unique material in education and research, available as a playground to the students and to the innovation communities at EPFL and all around the world.

The Montreux Jazz Digital Project is the leading project of the Center since 2010. Defined in collaboration with the Claude Nobs Foundation, it drives activities in many labs and partners of EPFL, with hundreds of researchers involved, addressing a large range of domains from technology to archiving, sociology or art.

In 2019, as part of a collaboration with the Swiss Space Center and the Swiss Space Office, our Center launched the project to digitize the archives of Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier. Entering its last phase, this work will make the content available to the entire space community, Swiss and international. As a testimony, the collection will highlight the trajectory of Claude Nicollier. It will give rise to future collaborations involving EPFL and its partners, in the service of education and research.

Website EPFL Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center here:
https://www.epfl.ch/innovation/domains/cultural-heritage-and-innovation-center/