Chants and orcas: semi-automatic tools for audio annotation and analysis in niche domains

The recent explosion of web-based collaborative applications in business and social media sites demonstrated the power of collaborative internet scale software. This includes the ability to access huge datasets, the ability to quickly update software, and the ability to let people around the world collaborate seamlessly. Multimedia learning techniques have the potential to make unstructured multimedia data accessible, reusable, searchable, and manageable. We present two different web-based collaborative projects: Cantillion, and the Orchive. Cantillion enables ethnomusicology scholars to listen and view data relating to chants from a variety of traditions, letting them view and interact with various pitch contour representations of the chant. The Orchive is a project to digitize over 20,000 hours of Orcinus orca (killer whale) vocalizations, recorded over a period of approximately 35 years, and provide tools to assist their study. The developed tools utilize ideas and techniques that are similar to the ones used in general multimedia domains such as sports video or news. However, their niche nature has presented us with special challenges as well as opportunities. Unlike more traditional domains where there are clearly defined objectives one of the biggest challenges has been the desire to support researchers to formulate questions and problems related to the data even when there is no clearly defined objective.