At my KMDI talk, I met the co-founder of a tech start-up that deals with music and computation. My area of expertise is a little ‘softer’ compared to the technical know-how they have. I am interested in the flow of information from the ‘front’ end (interface design, visual communication, visual flow, etc) and the structure of information and knowledge for the user (information architecture, knowledge classification, etc.). Ultimately, we deal with the same ‘stuff’, just different objectives that compliment each other. Knowing how small the community dealing with technological research specific to the music domain is, it was a pleasure to learn that they are based in the city.

In other news, the On-Demand Book Service (ODBS) got a huge injection of money to move some of the current projects forward. The catch? We need to spend all of it before March 31st. The last 2 months Nadia’s class has worked towards a theoretical public event that would raise awareness of the library and information access issues related to First Nations (It is a rich area for research and development of real life solutions), as well as the ODBS project itself. A lot of the system design and facilitation experience I got from the project last year is in demand to make the event happen. Knowing that we have a healthy budget to work with, we can start materializing some of our ideas in a pilot event and community-based initiatives up North, which is very exciting for me.

Earlier this month (literally a couple of days ago), there was an interesting meeting of minds organized by my friend Vivian, who’s a computational linguist working at a speech facilitation lab in Bloorview Hospital under the supervision of Fraser Shein. He was actually a potential speaker for the KMDI event I’m organizing, but couldn’t make it due to schedule conflict. He was in attendance at the get together as well, but was at the ‘other’ end of the table whom I didn’t get to connect with. The start-up contact came along, and there was some very lively conversation as clear intersections between the attendee’s interest emerged. I am looking forward to the next one just to bask in the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, something that is usually so difficult in an academic setting, but perhaps high desirable in the real world context.

Trip planning for Oxford has also begun, I can’t believe that’s just over a month away, but I’ll save that for another post.

While taking the visual thinking class at the Knowledge Media Design Institute this summer, inevitably I wanted to explore its applications within the domain of music. It started as a vague idea followed by a search for something scholarly that Lysanne and I could ground it in. All the while, I had to reign in my tendency to go off in tangents and dreaming up ideas before the practical foundations have been laid. In that sense, Lysanne and I were great partners. The fact that she claims to have no musical inclinations except as an audience no doubt forced me to clarify some of my ideas to make sure it can be well understood. My lack of familiarity with creating models was also cause for exasperation at times.

The initial research question was three folds. One, it addresses the pedagogical need of self-initiated students who want to advance themselves while having no access to a real life music teacher. Two, it reacts to to the ubiquitous term “musicianship” that is defined in its particulars differently in every manifestation of every musical tradition. That is, one of those words that describes everything, and thus describes nothing (I’m generalizing quite a bit here, but I got your attention didn’t I?). Third, as an alternative approach to reflecting about the first two ideas, how could/does visualization convey these concepts? Already I had quite a handful, but it is always better to have too many ideas, than to be short on inspiration.

The final result is an academic poster which is linked by the image above. It is a framework for an online (where else?) knowledge-sharing community that facilitates information exchange surrounding the topic of musicianship, broadly speaking. For novice students who may not even be familiar with the concept to begin with, we simplified Authur’s framework for a transdisciplinary music lexicon to four areas that concepts about musicianship could fall into. Basic Performance Skills, Form & Pattern Recognition, Active Listening and Cultural Context. This is meant to facilitate exploration of musicianship.

Musicians will notice that specific skills that one could identify has not been inserted into this model. Keep in mind that this is a framework to solicit knowledge from a bottom-up approach, not an authoritative approach, and as such we have only put in a few things to give a sense of how it may be utilized. The “leaves” represent individual modules that lead to a more detail page with resources, discussions, and general information pertaining to that particular skill. So should someone learning guitar on their own by taking lessons on youTube be inclined, they will be able to refine their rhythmic skills in particular by looking up resources here.

One addition way that the information is organized is also by genre. We did not have a chance to assess existing genre classifications to see which would be the best one to ‘seed’ into this knowledge-sharing community, but we expect that the community would modify and enrich any classification system that they initially encounter on Musin’.

Much more detail on the design of this concept can be read in the poster itself, but i think this suffice as an introduction to the idea that was developed. I received some good feedback during its presentation a couple of weeks ago, and am trying to think of ways in which to further develop this into either a master’s thesis, as well as a collaboration project with others. For now, at least the idea is well formed. Perhaps by letting it simmer a bit, inspiration will come to me. Do leave feedback in the comment section below!

(Also, tree metaphor inspired by an online exhibit on Emily Carr. Looking for the original site to link to!)

This has become essentially a framework for a tool where both a general or amateur audience who is interested in music can explore vis-a-vis musicianship categories, and where more advance and self-aware musicians or students can share their knowledge, and learn from each other. We’re basing our model on Andy Arthur’s article entitled in part, “Transdisciplinary concepts and skills in artistic practice” (2006) and Michael Hannan’s article entitled, “Contemporary music student expectations of musicianship training” (2006).

Arthur’s work addresses a main interest I have, which is the diversity in what one might define as a music community when we look beyond any one tradition, and the interdisciplinary nature of music, in that it very rarely exists entirely on its own. He posits a few general areas of musicianship, and we have distilled it into 4 levels musicianship understand in which specific skills can be assigned (from macro to micro): Cultural Context of Music, Active Listening, Form & Pattern Recognition and Basic Performance Skills.

These four are closely interrelated, and skills that fall into the micro levels, are also relevant to the macro levels. For now, as a navigational decision, concepts that fall into the more macro levels are not addressed at the more micro level. For example, while a comprehension of the cultural context is necessary for any performer, it is difficult to come up with a taxonomy that encompasses that. That is, it is more of a qualitative skill than a quantitative skill. Things like rhythmic skills can be quantitative, in that it is easy to gage whether you have an understanding of rhythm, and how advance is your grasp of this skill.

This is by no means perfect, but we are not trying to be everything to everyone. This serves as a starting point to the design the interface and the conceptual model that runs the interface. So what can we test it with? This is where Hannan’s article comes into handy, as in his small survey of 43 students, students responded to a standard list of musicianship skills that they are trained in, and were asked to rate their importance. Furthermore, students were also asked to suggest what musicianship skills were most essential to the genre that they’d like to play in. Genre and skills can be tricky, especially when it is up to Lysanne and I to come up with relevant skills. However, the idea is that it is the community of users that will contribute to this knowledge base, and by consensus of majority — much like how wikipedia works — patterns will emerge on their own.

Seeing as how our job is not to be prescriptive, we are using the musicianship skills that were considered “important” by students who wishes to study Jazz. The four main skills that are jazz specific were: Improvisation, Listening and Responding to others, Chord Substitution, and Sight-reading or Chart-reading.

As for how all these interrelate, we’ve got some rough sketches which makes no sense to anyone else except for Lysanne and I. There are lots of things I haven’t addressed in this post, and it’s because a picture tells a thousand words. That was initially part of the challenge I set for myself in this course: how can you visualize aspects of music, and how can that be useful?

If you have made it this far without getting lost, I applaud you. I certainly can’t say I’ve been able to wrap my head around this consistently over the last few weeks! I will try to post some work-in-Progress by the end of Sunday. There has been a few great speakers over the last week too, like Sheelagh Carpendale and Greg Van Alstyne (which I had to miss unfortunately, archives will be up!). I will write more about them after I tackle a growing list of chores I’ve been neglecting lately.

1. There is no ‘right way’ to learn music. The process is one of trying out different things, and finding one that you have an affinity for.
2. Overemphasis on the western tradition and the enlightement concept of scientific understanding of music in the form of analysis does not accurate or aptly capture broadly what music-making or music-appreciation consists of.
3. The collaborative and communal nature of music (in its making, sharing, teaching, etc.) is an important factor to consider when grappling with how this tool may be used.

To be continued…

Music cannot be transmitted alone devoid of all concepts in that sense, but it is a far way from being a coherent argument for a “musical language” as Cohn argues for a “visual language” in human cognition. Ethnomusicology may be the perfect domain in which to seek answers regarding this issue, because they study music not only from the western tradition, but adapt a variety of ethnographic approaches to the study of all manifestations of music. In fact, now that I think about it, that may have very well become my topic had I pursued a masters in ethnomusicology. Now, since I am not doing a musicology degree, what exactly then, is my interest in VL and related research in the context of music information retrieval? I’m not sure, but here are some thoughts that crossed my mind.

For one, we do need to have conceptual models of “translating” music into a “language” that serves for easy retrieval from the systems perspective, as well as from the human perspective. There may not be a formal “musical language” that is identifiable or qualifiable, but is there a universal way (or a few broadly used forms) of music cognition that exists and can be applied in IR system design to improve access and retrieval of musical information?

More brainstorming later. However, for now, I have a more nuanced understanding of the challenges that come with trying to map “linguistic” features on top of something that only fits the layman definition of language.

As you have no doubt noticed in my de.li.ci.ous feed at the bottom of the page, I have been trying to compile a list of MIR related conferences that I should stay on top of. This one is, by far, the best one I have found in the last month. Whee.

Ok, I should stop, I’m getting giddy again.