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cc-metadata - Re: Tagging music with tempo, time signature

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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: Lucas Gonze <lgonze AT panix.com>
  • To: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: junkone AT worldware.com
  • Subject: Re: Tagging music with tempo, time signature
  • Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 18:12:48 -0400 (EDT)


I don't know of such a thing, but I'm really intrigued by it. I'd be interested to see any followups that come out of the conversation.

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

Here's a request for additional work metadata. Sounds very useful. Anyone know of existing vocabularies that incorporate these items or have related requests or advice?

Mike Linksvayer wrote:
Thanks for following up. If I can summarize, you'd like to constrain searches for music by
- time signature
- bpm
- user-defined keywords (a la del.icio.us)

Mind if I forward your email to the cc-metadata list?

Thanks again,
Mike

Tom Hill wrote:

Hi Mike,

I was nice talking with you at the Emerging Technology Sig on Tuesday.

We were discussing other characteristics of music that someone might want to search for. I have few things I do to manage my songs in iTunes. I'd love to see them extended to generally available metadata, for search engines, etc.

New Fields:
In particular, since I DJ ballroom dance events, I need to find music, for example, in 3/4 time, with a tempo of between 86 and 96 beats per minute. None of the music search engines that I have found track this info. iTunes does allow users/creators to tag with work a BPM field (but not a time signature). But if no one else is doing it, then one should probably start with iTunes format for BPM, and see if it can be generalized for time signature, etc.

The sad thing is, it's trivial for the artist to tag the song with this information, since they have this information. But they don't yet, because there is nowhere for them to publish this info.

This information is useful to anyone who plays music for people to dance to.

Problems with Tagging:
The other difficulty I find is that most tagging systems want to use some predetermined set of tags to identify songs. (e.g. the Genre list you find on most search engines). Not only are these lists way too limiting (waltz, for example, is in none that I have found), but they invariably have the idea that ONE of there options is the answer, when clearly many would fit.

For example, a song may be a silly, country western, waltz, with a romantic theme.

So, in my opinion any truly useful tagging scheme would allow user defined tags, and would allow as many tags as necessary

If I can be helpful in encouraging people to do this, or in helping it happen, let me know.

Thanks,

Tom

For example:
Things that I tag on my songs (using unstructured comment fields, and searching)
Christmas, Halloween
Silly, romantic
PG-13
Waltz|Salsa|Swing
etc.





--
Mike Linksvayer
http://creativecommons.org/about/people#21
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