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Archive for the ‘music-esque’ Category

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Where did January go?

In Misc., music-esque on January 27, 2011 at 8:41 am

This month, I went and did a bit of travels to visit an old friend in Beijing. This was the first time I had been in that city since I was about 5, so this really felt like a whole new experience. To be honest I was a bit anxious about the trip in some ways. I haven’t travelled to China by myself before, and despite knowing how to read complex chinese and how to speak Cantonese, Mandarin and simplified chinese is a whole different ball game. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how I did manage to communicate pretty well, and how quickly I felt like I was a resident of the city while I was staying at my friend’s home. Coming back, I already miss the fried pancakes made fresh on the streets, and the fresh fruits that were in season that did not have to be frozen during their transportation from southern China.

The highlight of my experience was exploring the history of Peking Opera and seeing a live performance of one. Like so many things, seeing a live performance allows you to appreciate much more than what can be conveyed in a video recording. I was surprised to learn that the art form is only about 200 years old, barely a dent in China’s almost 4000 years of history as a civilization. It was also a thrill every time I bumped into a chinese music instrument store, or walked in on a rehearsal of some kind of performance and watching it for a while (no one kicked me out!), and sometimes even overhearing an ensemble practicing inside a building. A visit to the Heaven Temple also lead to the discovery of a “Ministry of Music” that dedicated its work to support the Emperor’s ritualistic offerings to the Heavens, with instruments that I could play with to boot. Did I mention that I saw maybe 5 other people in that exhibit while I was there? I guess tourists don’t like the cold nor do they like to walk!

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Music isn’t just for musicians. (Duh.)

In music-esque, My Work on December 23, 2010 at 11:03 am

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!

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Musicianship as Citizenship: The Shakuhachi Phenomenon

In music-esque, My Work on November 16, 2010 at 10:19 pm


Last Monday, I was very excited about Kiku’s arrival from Denmark. I had been reviewing the skype interviews she conducted with members of the Shakuhachi Forum, and slowly became acquainted with the emergent phenomenon of an online community of shakuhachi players outside of Japan. To take on the shakuhachi (Japanese flute) as anything more than a hobbyist is a difficult task if you cannot speak Japanese, do not have acccess to a teacher in Japan, or at least one who has studied extensively in Japan. Many who become enamoured with the instrument through zen buddhism, Japanese films, anime and manga do not have ready access to the shakuhachi traditions and practices, and may very well find themselves quite alone in their obsession within their immediate circles. This was true, of course, before the age where personal video conferencing technology such as Skype became relatively accessible and affordable to a significant segment of the world’s population.

The phenomenon of a relatively inaccessible musical tradition to the western world —except the select few who have the means, the time and the drive to pursue such knowledge and practice—becoming more opened as a result of the internet is not unique to Shakuhachi. In fact, it can happen to any system of knowledge and practice that is transmitted orally in a face-to-face and communal context. So why shakuhachi?

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