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Projects
La Scala Theatre

The project with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan lasted a total of 13 years, embracing different activities.

July 1996: the phonic archive rescue project begins. Goffredo Haus is the scientific coordinator of the project. At LIM the archive recordings of the theater since 1951 are digitized or ripped, for a total of about 5000 media and 10000 hours of music. The original materials consisted of open-reel analog tapes (from 1951 to 1990) and DAT (from 1990 to present). Analog media have been thermally pre-treated to recover the original audio information, then contents have been edited for track separation.

January 1997: the experimental project for the digitalization of music scores begins, and it is completely carried out at LIM.

October 1998: the D.A.M. project (standing for Digital Asset Management / Depositi Archivi Magazzini) begins. The goal is to digitize and integrate all aspects of the theater archives: scores, audio, photographs and playbills, sketches and fashion plates, props, costumes and accessories, monographs. The scientific coordination of the project is given to Goffredo Haus; the execution of the project is entrusted to Andersen Consulting (later Accenture) for multimedia files and to LIM for the music archive (audio and scores).

October 2002: the integration of the theater archives into a single environment begins. LIM designs and implements: a multimedia database common to all archives; data-loading and cataloging applications; an interface to launch integrated queries on the archives via the intranet. Technical partners include Accenture, Fastweb, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, and TDK.

In this framework, particularly advanced technologies have been developed. It is worth citing the software application called M.A.I.S. (Musical Archive Information System), which provides access to both the audio recordings and the corresponding scores in an integrated environment. Contents - i.e. scores and recordings - can be retrieved by humming or by writing a few notes on the screen.

Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale
Dipartimento di Informatica
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via G. Celoria 18, 20133 Milano, ITALY
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Goffredo Haus, director
Phone: +39 02 50316 222
E-mail: goffredo.haus@unimi.it
  Luca A. Ludovico, technical contact
Phone: +39 02 50316 382
E-mail: luca.ludovico@unimi.it
  Laboratory
Phone: +39 02 50316 382
E-mail: lim@di.unimi.it