Developinimmersive VR experience for visualizing cross-cultural relationships in music

With the advent in advanced computing methodologies and forward-thinking data storage needs over the last decade, there has been a major drive for reformatting archival collections to enable advanced computational analysis. In this paper, we present our digital compendium of music from the Arab Mashriq and Western Indian Ocean comprising two music collections drawn from Library materials and field recordings at the New York University Abu Dhabi. This is at once the product and object of our ongoing research at the intersection of cultural heritage preservation and computational analysis. Through computational-ethnomusicological research, we explore the cross-cultural similarities, interactions, and patterns from the music excerpts in order to understand their similarity space by employing audio analysis, machine learning, and visualization techniques. Besides the digital artifactual value, pedagogical/educational and scholarly outcomes, we focus on attracting user-friendly and community engagement into appreciating the music from this region. This is done by providing interactive visualizations of the musical features on a dashboard application and 3-D rendering of the mappings in a VR environment. The VR experience is not only immersive but also provides a scope for appreciation, learning, and dissemination of the music from the region.