Music indexing?

[Al'x]

All there is to distinguish music is "musical artist" and "song". This works fine for most pop and rock and rap and stuff, but for much music (especially pre-1900) it is hard to know what to put?

My main question is, what actually goes into "musical artist"? I would think composer, but then how do you find stuff from an artist like Bobby Mcferrin or George Shearing? (they have very distinctive styles) You don't even know the instrument until you have downloaded and started the video! In different situations, performer, composer, editor, vocalist, conductor, arranger, producer, or any combination could be the most important. This even comes up in pop songs sometimes, when a band is covering another one or something like that.

Are optional fields for instruments used, or more specific fields for contributors to the music ever going to be included or considered or whatever? I guess on the other hand, not much people use instrumental or classical stuff, especially outside of what is extremely popular... =\

[Kalium]

If you have ideas, good. If you're willing to go through the music catalogue and label everything, you're insane.

For classical, it's usually composer that's used. People think of "Bach's Air for the G String" (first song in my Classical directory, OK?), not "Bach's Air for the G String performed by Boston Pops directed by $PERSON". Well, not usually. You get my point, I think.

With covers, it's the performer.

[trythil]

Are optional fields for instruments used, or more specific fields for contributors to the music ever going to be included or considered or whatever? I guess on the other hand, not much people use instrumental or classical stuff, especially outside of what is extremely popular... =\

"Instruments used" would be a hopelessly impossible field to fill out except for extremely trivial cases. Modern music often uses exotic instrumentation, much of it the product of digital signal processing. Unless everyone here has done substantial sound engineering, it's unlikely that everyone will correctly fill out this field.

Additionally, even so-called "classical" instruments throw lots of people for a loop: how many people cannot distinguish a violin from a viola, or a piccolo trumpet from your "standard" Bb trumpet? Or, even better, how about a C trumpet from a Bb trumpet, or Uilleann bagpipes from, say, highland bagpipes? Such ambiguities make instrumentation useless for categorization.

If the point of this field is not to provide precise categorization, but rather an idea of the sound of the music, then instrumentation is still useless. (I'm going to go back to the example of the trumpet because I'm a trumpet player, but what I'm going to write holds true for just about any instrument.) The same musical instrument can take on entirely different sounds and moods depending on their context and usage. The bagpipes in Peter Gabriel's "Biko" sound different -- they are much more subdued -- from the (Uilleann) bagpipes in Yuki Kajiura's "open your heart"; the trumpet in Frou Frou's "The Dumbing Down of Love" is much softer and a lot fuzzier than that in Wynton Marsalis' rendition of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 in F Major. Part of this is post-processing but a lot of it is just adapting the instrument to different contexts. You don't get any of that by just reading general instrument descriptions, which makes it useless.

So we could solve this by going to "genre". Again, however, this is only easily done for extremely trivial cases. Anything beyond that and you run into classification problems that stem from subjectivity. Great examples come from electronic music: one person's "techno" is another person's "dance" is another person's "eurobeat". What to do?

[inthesto]

I sometimes have difficulty with this when I'm adding entries for video game music that has multiple composers and I can't find a site with a track-by-track on who did what.

Generally, I'll just attribute to the first person on the list in the catalogue, and then have the actual full list in my credits bumper.