• Intellectual property and business models: commonly understood frameworks for publishing and master rights to particular audio and music recordings will be challenged within the Audio Commons Ecosystem (ACE), and we will research on making those challenges understandable, and ultimately, useful for the industry. In the first instance, this will involve understanding the rights management requirements in a high-reuse scenario such as the one we envision, and usage recommendations made as necessary. Research into emerging business models possibly created by ACE interaction with publishers/creators/consumers will also be carried out.

• Audio Ontologies: an important part of the research in Audio Commons will be focused on defining an ontology for the unified annotation of audio content able to allow proper representation and retrieval of content in different use cases of the creative industries. We will ground the design of the ontology in requirements collected from the industry and extend existing work on multimedia semantic representation. The concepts of the ontology will serve as a guide for the semantic audio annotation technologies that will be further developed.

• Semantic description of audio content: we will work on improving the state-of-the-art in sound and music description and semantic representation technologies. We will focus our research on aspects that have been usually overlooked in existing literature (such as the development of descriptors targeted to short music samples). Also, we will stress the development of reliable high-level semantic descriptors with the use of bigger and crowd-sourced datasets. We will on the one side focus on the description of music content (i.e. music pieces and music samples), and on the other side focus on the description of non-musical content such as sound effects.

AudioCommons.org