Workshop «SoundtrackID», 9. Oktober 2026

According to European copyright laws, a film enters the public domain 70 years after the death of its creators. This calculation becomes more complex when a film uses pre-existing music (pieces not written originally for the score), as the copyright of every composer and lyricist must be cleared independently. For archives and researchers, manually verifying dozens of uncredited tracks across large film collections is a nearly impossible barrier, making it incredibly difficult to safely share historical audiovisual data across borders or deposit it into open repositories.

SoundtrackID, jointly developed by the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and funded by the Open Science Program of swissuniversities, aims at au-tomatizing this process, by using existing acoustic fingerprinting APIs. The SoundtrackID tool au-tomatically analyses a film’s soundtrack, isolates parts containing music, sends these to the API, and presents the results.

Our beta version is ready for real-world testing. We invite media scholars, film archivists, digital humanities researchers, and legal metadata specialists to join us for a one-day Data Sprint at the University of Zurich on 9 October 2026.
The goals of this day are:

• Stress-testing the tool with a wide range of diverse, real-world archival film examples. We particularly welcome “difficult” and non-canonical cases – such as films with degraded au-dio, heavy background noise, overlapping dialogue, or non-Western music – to test our tool's capabilities
• Evaluating usability and gathering community feedback to shape the final public release.
• Exchanging ideas on the future of film copyright, metadata standards, and open research data sharing

Please email simon.spiegel@uzh.ch  by 13 September 2026 with a brief note describing your re-search or archival background, and the types of film materials you would like to test. 

Thanks to the generous support of our funding program, we are able to cover travel and accommo-dation expenses for external participants. Please note, however, that space is strictly limited, and we will only be able to accommodate a small group of attendees. Detailed technical guidelines for selected participants will follow.