Interactive Wagner

Follow Wagner's opera "Walküre" with an interactive web player.

Music with its many representations can be seen as a multimedia scenario: There exist a number of different media objects (e.g., video recordings, lyrics, or sheet music) beside the actual music recording, which describe the music in different ways. In the course of digitization efforts, many of these media objects are nowadays publicly available on the Internet. However, the media objects are usually accessed individually without using their musical relationships. Using these relationships could open up new ways of navigating and interacting with the music. In this work, we model these relationships by taking the opera Die Walküre by Richard Wagner as a case study. As a first step, we describe the opera as a multimedia scenario and introduce the considered media objects. By using manual annotations, we establish mutual relationships between the media objects. These relationships are then modeled in a database schema. Finally, we preset a web-based demonstrator which offers several ways of navigation within the opera recordings and allows for accessing the media objects in a user-friendly way.

Try it out yourself: http://mir.audiolabs.uni-erlangen.de/2017-GI-DemoWalkuere/

Screenshot from the web-based interface showing 5 performances of Wagner's Walküre, Act 1, the libretto, the associated video, and the sheet music in a piano-reduced version.

Associated Publications

  1. Die Oper als Multimedia Szenario: Wagners Walküren gehen online
    Stefan Balke, Manuel Hiemer, Peter Schwab, Vlora Arifi-Müller, Klaus Meyer-Wegener, and Meinard Müller
    In Proceedings of the GI Jahrestagung, 75–86, 2017
    Bib