Abstract
The equal.music platform is a wide-ranging digital ecosystem for music discovery, presentation, and interaction, designed and built by the researcher for commercial development. It comprises multiple interconnected applications – TIMELINE (interactive biographical/musical timeline), PLAYER (audio playback with scholarly metadata), NAVIGATOR (music discovery interface), and supporting infrastructure – that together investigate how digital tools can transform the way music is discovered, understood, and experienced. The platform generates new knowledge in digital music humanities: specifically, how interactive timeline-based navigation, cross-referenced metadata, and integrated playback can reveal relationships between musical works, biographical events, and historical contexts that are invisible in traditional presentation formats (liner notes, programme booklets, discographies). Building on ontological and technological research conducted by the researcher at the Royal Academy of Music (RAMline) and at the BBC, and since for various companies (musicDNA, Klangr). The platform’s architecture has been developed with the latest AI models and building on the researcher’s own programming over more than a decade – resulting in a shared infrastructure serving 20+ apps across multiple domains and a dual ecosystem bringing together music and well-being – constitutes a technical research finding about scalable digital music presentation. The QKL.Hub.js auto-initialisation system, the cross-domain authentication architecture, and the interactive TIMELINE visualisation each represent specific innovations in digital music humanities tooling.