There is a common clarification that I have to make when I speak with others about my ideas about music knowledge: when I talk about music knowledge, it goes beyond music as a sound-based product, I am talking about all the other non-musical elements that go around that product. (The idea of music as a ‘product’ doesn’t work for me… so much music around the world exists outside of the desire to be commercialized, but that’s perhaps another rant for another post.)

One of the problems that the field of Music Information Retrieval tries to address is music recommendation. Much of the technology draws from techniques developed in textual information retrieval systems, while treating the ‘document’ as the encoded sound itself. While the technology for audio recognition is being developed (speech, music, noise, etc.), MIR research relies heavily on human tagging to generate music recommendations and genre-based classifications.

What is entirely missing to me is, well, everything else. The research is necessarily focused and narrow, but if you conceive the full spectrum of music as it manifests throughout history and across the globe, the “music as product” concept applies to mostly the international economic model of music. This model drives research into developing more nuanced genres in more popular types of music, and more token acknowledgement of less popular genres that still have substantial market share.

Amidst all this, what is obviously missing to me are the broader music information behaviour of individuals beyond the desire to find music. Consumers of popular music don’t just consume the song, they consume the culture, the history, the fan base, a whole ecology of information and resources that they have an interest in. It’s a wicked problem, at a broad conceptual level, and even in traditional settings such as music libraries, or novel knoweldge exchange platforms that facilitates “direct collaboration rather than a series of directed monologues acting as a makeshift conversation”.

The conceptual picture is coming together for me, now it’s time to scale back and look at what the milestones needs to me. Systems are not built on an idea after all, time to take it back to the “line by line” level.

But first: lots of sleep and relaxation!