Semantic Web Technology for New Experiences Throughout the Music Production-Consumption Chain

The FAST project (Fusing Audio and Semantic Technology for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption) with 5 years of UK funding, has sought to create a new musical ecosystem that empowers all manner of people, from professional performers to casual listeners, to engage in new, more creative, immersive and dynamic musical experiences. Realising this requires a step-change in digital music technologies. Going beyond today's digital sound files, future experiences will demand far richer musical information, whereby music content will be packaged in a flexible, structured way that combines audio recordings with rich, layered metadata to support interactive and adaptive musical experiences. This defines the overall ambition of FAST-to lay the foundations for a new generation of ‘semantic audio’ technologies that underpin diverse future music experiences. This paper therefore aims to describe the overall vision of the project, set out the broad landscape in which it is working, highlight some key results and show how they bring out a central notion of FAST, that of Digital Music Objects, which are flexible constructs consisting of recorded music essence coupled with rich, semantic, linked metadata.