the montreux jazz festival and epfl ecole polytechnique fdrale de lausanne switzerland have launched a major project to digitise the largest audiovisual heritage of jazz blues and rock concerts from the past 45 years these 5000 hours of live performances have always been recorded with the best technical resources of the time for instance hdtv since 1991 technologies developed in epfl research laboratories are now able to enrich them even more the montreux jazz heritage lab launched last week has been created to infuse records with new life and to restore their musical emotional and historical force the lab is a result of a research involving architects interaction designers engineers acoustics and signal processing researchers as well as several industrial partners it offers a novel approach in the development of digital archives epfl was chosen by claude nobs founder of the montreux jazz festival and his partners because of its technological skills and ability to preserve and even enrich the fragile multimedia heritage that has been constituted during 45 years of montreux jazz festival on the aim of the project alexandre delidais project manager at epfl says to preserve the heritage for the next generations with a guarantee that it will not be altered technologies used and developed at epfl aim at saving the quality of the recordings and even enhancing them for a better experience noise reduction claps removal etc he further adds the second aspect embodied by the montreux jazz heritage lab has been to conceive and build an autonomous module allowing a breathtaking immersive experience people up to 4 can participate in the module and navigate through the archives with a dedicated touch interface based on a stateoftheart navigation system especially developed for its goal a curved screen and a fully immersive audio system provide an illusion for the spectator of being sent back into time in the middle of the stage the technologies that were developed in epfl labs include recording preservation and upgrading audio and video compression intensive transmission of data over the internet realtime audio and video recording at very high definition on access architecture of dataintensive servers intensive data storage data security cryptography on the module space conception laboratory architects coupled with illusonic acoustic research projection and display systems and haptic systems