In a good example of old meets new, a group of scientists and digital natives are compiling Indonesia's traditional music heritage for the next generation.



Indonesia has thousands of traditional songs, but until recently no one has managed to properly map them.



Motivated by this shortcoming, a group of scientists, musicians, artists and culture enthusiasts from complexity research institute Bandung Fe Institute and Sobat Budaya, an institution that specializes in the digital curation of Indonesian cultural heritage, then decided to curate, map, classify, analyze and present the findings through a mobile application called IndoMuse.



The application presents an interactive visualization of hundreds of Indonesian traditional songs in the form of a geometric map.



The map illustrates how each social group throughout the archipelago evolved in terms of their appreciation for the aesthetic aspects of sound and melody, and how they passed their musical heritage down from generation to generation.



The characteristics of each song are measured through statistical and thermodynamic physics. The app developers then analyze the parameters from the computation using an evolution tree, an approach taken from evolutionary biology.



'The notes in songs are basically sequences of sound frequencies played in a rhythm. Based on this, we can apply several statistical physics models to identify the pattern of notes and their length when they are being played in songs,' Sobat Budaya patron board head Hokky Situngkir told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.



'These models, in physics, are often used to identify numerous physical patterns formed by molecular interactions or micro particles ['¦].Furthermore, these micro particles or molecular patterns are the basic ingredients for thermodynamics physics, which is roughly concerned with research about aspects micro dynamic change that trigger macro aspects such as temperature, magnetic behavior and caloric change among others.'



Hokky then said that he and his colleagues at the Bandung Fe Institute and Sobat Budaya had the idea to use the statistical and thermodynamic physics approach to analyze the micro aspects of notes used in Indonesian traditional songs.



'Now, imagine that the notes that form the melody in the songs are micro particles and we use the statistics and thermodynamics physics models as glasses to capture the unique patterns of each song,' he said.



'In physics we use the concept of entrophy to observe the random patterns in gas particles, then in this case, we use several mathematical adaptations to see the randomness of notes within songs ['¦].From here, we can look for unique patterns in traditional songs all over the archipelago. We then use these unique patterns to develop our Indonesian traditional song map in the IndoMuse application.'



Looking at the traditional song map visualization in the application, users will be able to discover the musical kinship between the myriad of ethnic cultures in Indonesia.



The map takes the phylomemetic tree as its form, which is based on the phylogenetic tree in biology. Users can tap on each of the traditional song titles in the application and an interface will pop up so that the chosen song can be heard.



All mathematical variables used in the analytical process of the songs play the role as meme, which is the elementary unit of information yielding the complex cognitive aspects of human culture, while the phylomemetic tree shows the kinship between these various elements, just like the DNA sequences in biological structures. The kinship between collective cognitive systems from place to place is reflected in the branches and leaves of the phylomemetic tree.



The people involved in the research process to develop the application are divided into three groups, Hokky said.



The first group consisted of data miners.



'Without the data curated in an open digital library from the budaya-indonesia.org website, it would have been impossible to construct the mapping for the application,' Hokky said.



The second group were the researchers, who produced a research paper titled The Complexity of Traditional Cultures that was published at the Bandung Fe Institute and the third group translated the data and the research into the form of a mobile application.



The application was launched to commemorate Youth Pledge Day on Oct. 28, 2015.



Hokky said that the application still needed a lot of improvement in terms of interface and user friendliness.



'The current version is still a beta version ['¦]. Numerous additional features will be added in upcoming future updates and versions,' Hokky said.



Hokky also said that the team that developed the application also planned to create similar applications that would map other aspects of Indonesian culture.



'We are currently developing an application that will map the traditional bureaucracy of kingdoms that once existed or still exist in the Indonesian archipelago. Applications that will map traditional food, toys and dances are also under development,' he said.



Hokky said that the purpose of the application was to provide a clear information and viewpoint about the diversity of Indonesia's traditional cultures and thus eventually trigger the country's creative industry players to create something new based on the diversity depicted in the applications.



'When the map of such tremendous diversity has been clearly presented, then artists, musicians and scientists will have easier access to do their own creative explorations within it. I believe the creative economy era is one in which cultural richness can be transformed into economic richness for the community at large,' he said.

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