Bridging Fan Communities and Facilitating Access to Music Archives through Semantic Audio Applications

Semantic Audio is an emerging field in the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, knowledge representation and ontologies, unifying techniques involving audio analysis and the Semantic Web. These mechanisms enable the creation of new applications and user experiences for music communities. We present a case study focussing on what Semantic Audio can offer to a specific fan base, that of the Grateful Dead, characterised by a profoundly strong affinity with technology and the internet. We discuss an application that combines information drawn from existing platforms and results from the automatic analysis of audio content to infer higher-level musical information, providing novel user experiences particularly in the context of live music events.