New interactive player Europeana Radio launches as an outcome of Europeana Sounds project

The new application Europeana Radio, powered by songs from the Europeana Music Collections and gathering audio archives from all over Europe, is launching on 12 January.

This latest achievement has been accomplished after 3 years of collecting sounds archives on Europeana Music from institutions across Europe. The Europeana Sounds project involved 24 partners from 12 European countries (including national libraries, sound institutions, research centres and universities) working together to make audio and audio-related content accessible to public audiences, the creative industries and researchers. One outcome of the project, Europeana Music Collections gather music recordings, sounds, radio programmes and more musical archives enriched with meaningful contextual knowledge. To ensure the widest possible availability of this content, Europeana Radio builds on the Music Collections and provides an easy access to a wide ranging selection of sound treasures, inviting historians, academics and listeners from general audiences to experience these recordings through a player. Almost 200,000 unique playable tracks are available to browse or play on random mode on three stations - Classical Music; Traditional and Folk Music; and Popular Music. Currently, 12 institutions have made their collection available in the radio, with more to come.

But Europeana Radio is an interactive tool more than just a radio: users can contribute and enrich the experience for others by tagging the musical genre while listening. Powered by the in-development Europeana Annotations API, this user tagging feature was thought as an opportunity to increase the discoverability of Institutions’ content in Europeana, and therefore enable content to reach more users – one of the platform’s core purposes. Technically speaking, it relies on semantic tagging to allow cross-language search: the tags themselves are drawn from a multilingual vocabulary. For instance, a French user searching for “musique chorale” will find objects tagged with “choral music, the tag value having multiple labels in multiple languages.