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Posts Tagged ‘music knowledge’

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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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August: Progress Update

In Reflections on August 10, 2010 at 1:09 pm

Over the last month, all my writing effort has been going into the development of my thesis proposal, which in part explains the decline of blog posts here. In fact, I can already foresee that over the next year, I will pay a lot less attention to leaving online breadcrumbs. I will strive to post at least a monthly-update as I have continued to do, but I won’t try to do any more than that. It’s a combination of the thesis work, as well as the random ideas I tend to throw around actually catching and slowly growing. It’s the mind-boggling excitement that a parent experiences when their child stands on their two feet for a few seconds before falling on their butt, or when that child finds their first playmate. It’s hardly worth noting in the grand scheme of things, but they are milestones that keep you going along a pursuit that is mostly unglamorous, and if it weren’t for love, no sane human being would put themselves through it.

In addition to proposal writing, some old thread are getting picked up. Click here to read on.

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The Design of Knowledge Organization

In Design, ICTs on July 18, 2010 at 8:15 pm

In the design of an information or knowledge-based system, values are built in to the fundamental assumptions about what information and knowledge actually is. Such values can be understood in an overarching and philosophical sense, as well as in a situated sense within certain communities, organizations, and particular types of users. In fact, such fundamental reflections are an essential first step to ensure that the knowledge-based initiative has a clear trajectory to follow. The design of knowledge organization — not the adaptation and implementation of standard or popular classification systems — is a phase that most people ignore out of convenience for a quick launch of a beta version, or a tight budget that needs to be spent for a clear ROI. The benefits of designing a knowledge organization strategy (which may involve conducting domain analysis, user studies, genre and document mapping) are not concrete, but it is fundamental to the long-term success of any information and knowledge-based undertaking. In fact, the whole process might not be that different from engaging in a philosophical discourse on epistemology, or a reflection about the nature of knowledge, but situated in a real-life context with design implications (whether that’s system design, website design, or library design). In effect, you are developing a model of knowledge (in my case, a model of music knowledge) that is conceptualized to serve a particular community (in my case, online self-taught musicians). I also articulated this in about 7500 words, this post is a coles notes-to-myself!

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