The PHENICX project will mainly focus on Western classical
music in large ensemble settings. Classical music is a
very strong example of European cultural heritage, which
suffers from very strong audience stereotypes, and the general
image of being a complex and possibly boring genre.
As such, it does not straightforwardly attract new audiences,
and its live performance tradition may be endangered
as outlined in our Motivation. As will be outlined in
the remainder of this paper, Western classical music also
poses several interesting research challenges that are not
encountered for other musical genres, and thus can help in
pushing scientific advances in music and multimedia information
retrieval forward. The project will be structured in
four different research and development areas.