Aim: Help fund some significant improvements to the system that powers the incredible early music resource at www.polyphonydatabase.com
PolyphonyDatabase.com is a detailed catalogue of early music sources designed to help musicians perform, academics study, and enthusiasts explore a vast and glorious repertoire quickly and easily. It aims to combine the practicality of CPDL with the academic rigour and ambition of the RISM census, to make use of similar projects where possible, and to directly combat the frustrations performing musicians have with all existing resources.
It is an altruistic endeavour and will always be free to access. There are currently only a handful of administrators, but as its stability and functionality improves I plan to allow more people to sign up and contribute.
Its three main goals are:
The Polyphony Database was written in Ruby on Rails by a professional web developer, and all the code is free to peruse at https://github.com/frahasio/polyphonydatabase. The site has been live since August 2017, and a large amount of cataloguing has already been completed.
We've mainly concentrated on sources of sacred choral music to date, especially where facsimiles of the original exist online, but we intend to include secular and instrumental music. Obviously, the usefulness of the database depends on the quantity and quality of its content so I want to make sure that contributors can spend as much time as possible generating this and as little as possible trawling Google, battling with spreadsheets, and repeating work.
The site is already a useful resource, but there are several improvements that need to be made to the data model and the cataloguing/filtering process before the database can achieve its full potential. I can't afford to bankroll the project as a hobby any longer - the funding amount is based on a quote for the original developer to complete the following:
On top of these structural changes:
I have been cataloguing, editing, and performing Renaissance music for more than a decade, mostly just for fun. My academic achievements end with an unimpressive BMus in composition, but through sheer enthusiasm and persistence I've had the privilege of working with many luminary musical minds and internationally renowned performers.
My number crunching day jobs in the last decade have taught me a lot about data and its manipulation, putting me in the unique position of having experienced the shortcomings of existing early music resources and knowing what needs to be done to improve them.