Rolex Learning Center
From March 12 to 27
Opening event on Wednesday, March 11, at 6 p.m.
EPFL is a regular guest at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and is heavily involved in the digitalization of the Festival’s vast concert archives. Now, it’s EPFL’s turn to be the host. As a delightful prelude to the 2016 opening of the Montreux Jazz Café at EPFL in its new Under One Roof project, EPFL will present some of the festival’s gems in the Rolex Learning Center.
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Possibility for the public to discover and browse all the concerts actually scanned by EPFL on an iPad application (75 % of 5000 hours videos)
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Several models of SounDDots – in the main entrance: loudspeaker arrangements that project very high-quality directional sound and are connected to the iPad tablets that let users browse the Jazz Festival’s archives.
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I.AM project – located at the main entrance: visitors can virtually experience an immersive audiovisual walk through the reconstructed Montreux Casino of 1971.
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Projection of select concerts from the Montreux Jazz Festival: watch and listen to them in the White Box in the Caféteria Klee.
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Some Montreux Jazz Festival posters. Since 1967, the Festival has given Swiss and international artists free rein to define the event’s international image. Niki de Saint Phalle, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean Tinguely, are some of the prestigious artists that have left their mark on the Festival’s posters.
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Over 5000 hours of audio and video recordings, spanning close to 50 years of concerts held in Montreux by some of the 20th Century’s biggest names in music. The Montreux Jazz Festival’s archives are a treasure to behold. Since 2013, this collection, which is managed by the Claude Nobs Foundation, has been classified as international heritage in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” list. This unique cultural heritage has become the focus of EPFL’s Metamedia Center, through the Montreux Jazz Digital Project – a vast endeavor aiming to digitalize and archive its content. Three quarters of the Festival’s concerts have already been successfully stored in this way.
Preservation is not the only focus of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. It also coordinates several initiatives that aim to make the most out of this precious musical heritage. These include the development of archiving tools (data bases, high capacity servers, tools to add metadata, indexing and tagging) and technological applications to facilitate access to the archives and enrich the user’s exerience.
Opening at the end of 2016, EPFL’s Montreux Jazz Café will be an experimental and innovative space dedicated to promoting the Festival’s archives. The Café is one of three pavilions at the interface between culture and technology that will be hosted by the Under One Roof project, which is currently under construction on the Place Cosendey, at the heart of EPFL’s campus.
The Montreux Jazz Festival has an impressive visual history as well, with posters signed by Niki de Saint-Phalle, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Yoann Lemoine (a.k.a. Woodkid), and Jean Tinguely, to whom we owe the festival’s logo. The exhibition will present a selection of 18 posters from past editions of the festival, as a treat for both your eyes and your memory.