Discussions on Music
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I want to propose a new property, “preliminary forms,” that might be applied to the following types within the Music domain: - composition - concert - concert film - musical album - music video - music release - soundtrack
This property will serve to connect artistic “products” with their artistic “process.” What little access the general public has to the private processes of artists is mostly contained in websites that remain hidden if not sought out. It is important for the less expansive body of data which surrounds artistic means rather than its so-called ends, not be lost in the web’s expanse. A “preliminary form” property will begin to link process to product and bridge these gaps.
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I think there is also a need for a Album Contribution Mediator... just as we have for Recording and Track. http://www.freebase.com/schema/music/track_contribution
One example that I would like to help fill in eventually with this type of Mediator is the relationships between "Album" Art and a Visual Artist role among other things. Sometimes this data different at the Musical Release level, but 9 times out of 10 it's best to put that at the Musical Album level.
Paul Normansell who created the artwork/paintings for the Musical Album "Day & Age" by The Killers
I could see having "Album Cover artist" as a role. Along with just "Visual Artist". Other Album contribution roles would be stuff like "Audio Mastering" and "Package Designer" or perhaps specifically "Album Package Designer" and "Band photographer" which are hired roles typical for a Musical Album to be produced.
Thoughts ??
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We have album contributions; they are called Musical Contribution. For usage, see, for example, Little Earthquakes, which I filled out in some detail. However, that (as its name suggests) is intended for musical contributions, and doesn’t cover visual art contributions. One option would be to do what MusicBrainz does, which would be to broaden the existing contribution mediator to cover non-musical contributions. The other would be a new type for the non-musical contributions, which would be neater, but potentially confusing to users. Thoughts?
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Just as some background info... there's a Spotify App called "the Complete Collection" (have you seen it or installed it?) which is kinda cool and let's users visually zoom in and flip pages of CD music packages. It's a great way to showcase the art and design that goes into albums...however....it lacks metadata or even DATA, lol, that they could capture easily if OCR scanned and structured. I would like a place in Freebase, similar to MusicBrainz, for some of that metadata to live in.
I was thinking that a new type would probably cover this need to capture a generic "Album Contribution" for any contributions that would be non-musical.
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So a very popular trend in music in the past decade has been artists reworking pop/rock standards (like Paul Anka's swinging big band version of Smells Like Teen Spirit) as cover songs (tributes).
I would love to capture the relationship between source and covered version (sort of like adaptation in the media commons (should it be part of that type? Though I'd like to have a property that characterized the type of cover this is: identical?, revised, radical, language (english version of a foriegn language version), etc.
I guess another related property to consider would could be sampled song for samples as used in dance, rap/hip hop, mashups.
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The Composition type is the key here, along with the Arrangement. A fairly straightforward cover, like those performed by cover bands, would be a recording of the same Composition. A reworking, like Anka’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or the Brown Band’s version for that matter, or Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is a recording of an Arrangement which is in turn an arrangement of the original Composition.
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I wouldn't want to overload adaptation/adapted work for this, I don't think -- the additional properties would be too specific. But I think additional types or properties are the way to go with this -- I don't think the original recording artist of a song can be garnered with certainty in the current schema.
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I hadn't seen Chris's post when I wrote my last one. I wonder if it's possible, though, with the current composition/arrangement types, to assert "cover-songness". A cover song, I as understand the term, is necessarily of a pop song (otherwise, a majority of classical, stage musical, opera, and folk recordings, and a great many jazz recordings, would be considered covers, which they aren't). Or in other words, I don't think that Jimi Hendrix's recording of the Star Spangled Banner would really be considered a cover, any more than one by Kate Smith be.
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I was just wondering what the status of this was? Using Queen as an example, it would be cool to tie in how the Mupphets did a cover of this song.
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We couldn't find an easy way to discern exactly what we make a song recording/performance be a 'cover' as you can tell by the above discussion. It's a niche phenomenon of recent modern pop music and the data is sparse. That's said, if you could come up with an actionable definition and properties... That would be great.
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I think Chris is correct.
And so I tried to use some real data out there to try an example modeling (there's a ton of this data within the text reviews on covered songs on most review sites actually).
John Mellancamp's arrangement (covered song) / composition of Stones in My Passway by Robert Johnson :
http://www.freebase.com/inspect/m/0j2k5kf = John Mellancamp's covered song "Stones in My Passway"
When you look at this from an schema / inspect view, then it starts to make sense when using your brain, you easily switch out the phrase "arrangement" or "arrangement_of" with the words "covered song" and "song covered". Maybe we should promote the use of "arrangement" with an alias for "covered song" ?
I cannot think of any additional properties that I would put under a new type of "Covered Song" if it came into being, since I think Arrangement handles the use case already. You just have to alias it in your mind, and perhaps adding that as an alias in the Freebase schema and updating the Arrangement definition is all that might be needed.
For a definition around "Covered Song", as I said, I think "Arrangement" as the Composition Type handles this quite well, so we just need to extend the definition on the Arrangement Type itself by inserting the phrase "OR COVERED SONG" :
An Arrangement is any composition that is based on another composition; it may be a re-scoring of an orchestral work for piano or wind band, an instrumental arrangement OR COVERED SONG of a pop hit, or an orchestral suite based on a ballet. It may be by the same composer as the original or not. The Composer of the Arrangement should be the arranger; there is a wide variety of creativity expressed in an arrangement, from perfunctory to visionary, and it seems most straightforward to allow that to be expressed using the properties of Composition (as an included type).
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Then again...
There's a certain simplicity that just using the Composition Type itself brings. If we say that Composition is really "Song" as has often been stated, then "Covered Song" is merely showcasing that there are multiple recording versions of the composition (and ignore some of the properties under the Composition Type, that perhaps could be better suited if moved to the Arrangement Type itself ?)
Lucinda Williams created the song "Lafayette" which was "covered" "used again" "arranged again" "borrowed from" John Mellancamp with his RECORDED VERSION "Lafayette". And both of them deal with the Subject of Lafayette, Louisiana, since the act of "covering" usually means the same lyrics, and themes are borrowed as well. One possible exception I can think of might be Johnny Cash's "Personal Jesus" which does have a different theme than Depeche Mode's.
Maybe moving some properties to Arrangement from Composition might be the overall better long term strategy ? But which ones ? or which new properties could be hang off of the Arrangement Type ?
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What does the community think of classifying those few language Music Genres to a parent structure by the native language ? What would be the best modeling or topics to handle this ?
My initial reaction was to link the above topic of French Pop Music to a parent music genre of "French Language" (human language), it seems logical to me as ONE parent classification system to use... but am wondering if there are any gains to be had with linking to a new Music Genre or Media Genre called "French" ? To me, there does not seem to be much gain at all, and would make things much more confusing...because:
The other way of thinking would be this: The addition of the word "French" into any Music Genre appears to be a need to note the language of a particular genre, effectively creating a sub-genre. So, you could classify by a SECOND parent classification system that links French Pop Music to a parent music genre of "Pop Music".
Let's say I want to quickly query ALL "French Pop" music artists... their country of nationality might be "France", "Belgium", even "United States of America"...so there's an additional need to query and classify at the Music Genre level. iTunes, AMG, Musicbrainz, Spotify, all seem to sub-classify this way. Creating a query for ALL "French music" artists becomes harder when there is no parent Music Genre for "French music" that could be an additional parent genre to help further classify all the sub-genres such as "French House", "French Pop", "French rock", etc
Thoughts ?
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I think you need to distinguish between language, nationality, home country, and music genre. I'm not sure there is a "French music" genre, unless you're talking about traditional folk (and then you'd need to distinguish among Breton and other unrelated genres in the French geography). Celtic music spans Ireland, Bretagne, the Canadian Atlantic, etc and is sung in multiple languages by performers of various nationalities. Is a traditional Breton Celtic tune really "French Celtic"? That's not at all obvious to me.
Unless it's really a distinct genre, I don't think I'd qualify it. Do we need to distinguish between German death metal and U.S. death metal? Does German death metal have something in common with German opera which is useful to quantify? Obviously the language is the same, but is there any commonality in the music?
Also, if you look at the definition of French Rock, it's not defined the way you want it to be. It's any rock performed by an artist from France, no matter what language they sing it in. I think you probably want to create another dimension to classify along using language of performance or country of artist.
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Yeah Tom, Helping to query the "language of performance" at the Artist level is where I was asking for some cheating help. It doesn't seem that we can easily do that, or we could, but we might have community disagreement within.
It's a 2 or 3 sub-query method that gets me sort of what I want. But, I was hoping for 1 query :) but maybe that's not possible. And as you say, should not be, since it's not obvious at the Artist level anyway, but I was really hoping for that. (sigh) ... And having a new property called "Language of Performance" on the Musical Recording type seems to beg that it never will be filled in, since I cannot find any metadata at that level, but only at the Music Genre level. iTunes has nice "French Pop" genre music artists, and so does AMG's metadata for genre.
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does anyone know what would be involved with reconciling itunes ids?
they seem to have their own ids for artists..
musicbrainz and itunes connection?
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Hmmm, while technically, an artist could have a Paid Download Relationship linked to the iTunes URL, that is most certainly not the case for 99% of all topics that may have a match. There is no link to the MusicBrainz data either, so the a possibility to get that data is by reconciling the ids manually (ie. with Keymaster or Keymapper?).
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The Apple EPF (Enterprise Partner Feed) has all that metadata. Does Apple own those series of numbers called an iTunes id ? I do not think so. Not sure what Freebase / Google wants to do about storing an iTunes id as an authority key, but I would really like to see that happen, and I am sure others such as Facebook might grumble or perhaps not, if they also begin to provide a mechanism to help us reconcile with their entity id's for artists (once they figure it out correctly).
I am working on a large project of reconciling the Apple EPF data, and probably the ids could land back into Freebase, if I got some of those questions answered by staff. ;)
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oooooh thad, cool.
don't worry about the legality of linking, thats completely kosher imo. keep us informed on this, that's a biggie.
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YOU RULE MAN
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I would like to acknowledge my advice and recommendation that Freebase not allow Promotional Music releases to be added to Freebase.
http://thesoundtrackzone.blogspot.com/2009/11/john-q-promo-score-aaron-zigman-2002.html
http://www.soundtrackcollector.com/title/41078/John+Q.
Promotional film scores are usually handed to music judges such as Academy award film score judges for review purposes, and other independent media reviewers and veteran industry engineers. It is not a market product available to consumers. The individual tracks on those promotional releases are sometimes named, sometimes not, except for knowing "Track 1" has a length of xx:xx. There does indeed exist exchanges of these Promotional Music releases however and you can even find some on Ebay at times.
The composers and engineers themselves sometimes get an independent audio production company to press the CD for the promotional process and is a limited run typically.
The metadata I think that is useful to have in Freebase already hangs off the Music By property on the /film/film. So I do not see a need for Promotional Music such as the example above to be added to Freebase.
What do others think ?
This discussion is concerning Promotional Music only, and not Compositions themselves, which certainly need to be added to Freebase :)
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Are you seeing a particular problem here, or are you just trying to head something off at the pass?
I don't see a particular issue with having them, I guess. They clearly exist, for one thing. And being a market product available for consumers hasn't historically been a Freebase criterion that I'm aware of. And I don't see a lot of value in trying to exclude any such entities that might show up in, say, MusicBrainz from a Freebase load.
What's the harm in them?
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OK. I guess I was trying to provide a bit of research, context, and also prevent problems of clutter and not having enough metadata to resolve conflicts with Musical Album topics. I guess on second thought, we can let it swell into a problem, just like Chef Moz and MusicBrainz and then deal with it later as we have historically done. I'm OK with that also Jeff, thanks.
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It's pretty common in the jazz world for a bunch of independent artists to record an album together. This doesn't really make them a "group" in the traditional sense, but MusicBrainz seems to think that they are.
Should these be typed as a musical group with the various members added or should they get deleted (after updating the album with the individual artists)?
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They should be collaborations (and actually, MusicBrainz does distinguish between groups and collaborations). In Freebase, IMO, the right way to model them is to say that the album or track is just by multiple artists; “Under Pressure” is rightly both by David Bowie and by Queen, not by a group called “David Bowie and Queen.” However, that means that the MusicBrainz identifier for “David Bowie and Queen” (or “Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron”) has nowhere to connect. Metaweb punted on that decision and never, as far as I know, got back to it.
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What is the best practice now (2011) in dealing with Musical Artists that are not really a Musical Group, and probably never were represented as any official group during their media run or entertainment experience ?
Example: Back in Baby's Arms
Our wiki http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Commons/music/musical_group says "When multiple Artists or Musical Groups collaborate, they should only be typed as a Musical Group if they have designated a new name for their Musical Group."
So, if there is no group name, then to list the individuals themselves, rather than creating new topics with compounding join characters like "&" , Correct, so says the wiki now ?
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You are correct. "Back in Baby's Arms" should be recorded by "Sissy Spacek" and "Beverly D'Angelo" as two topics; the topic "Sissy Spacek & Beverly D'Angelo" really should be deleted. This is a holdover from an old MusicBrainz load from the old MusicBrainz schema (pre-NGS).
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YES! Thanks Jeff. Finally, some progress and agreement on moving forward with MusicBrainz cleanup ! ;)
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What is the best practice in dealing with Musical Artists that are not really a Musical Group, and probably never were represented as any official group during their media run or entertainment experience ?
Example: Back in Baby's Arms
Our wiki http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Commons/music/musical_group says "When multiple Artists or Musical Groups collaborate, they should only be typed as a Musical Group if they have designated a new name for their Musical Group."
So, if there is no group name, then to list the individuals themselves, rather than creating new topics with compounding join characters like "&" , Correct ?
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This sounds like what we've called "collaborations" in the past. It's not restricted to individuals since you can have multiple musical groups which have ongoing collaborations. I don't think a schema was ever proposed to handle it. Here's a relevant discussion: http://www.freebase.com/view/m/06hbqj0
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Maybe we should have a property on soundtrack for tv program and tv season? Lot's of soundtracks starting to populate the music catalogs for TV Shows, Seasons, and occasionally even episodes like the Buffy musical.
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Agreed having soundtracks for TV is a good idea. These are the questions that occur to me as I think about this:
- Should we use the existing /music/soundtrack type? It is documented as being for TV and film both, although it only has a property for film. However, we have separate "soundtrack" types for plays and operas.
- Regardless of whether we use a different type or the same type, how many types are we wanting to connect to? Options are: TV Program, TV Season, and TV Episode, or any combination thereof. TV Program seems the most natural, since it would allow all soundtracks for a show to be collected in a single property. I'd have to look at more data to have much of an opinion about seasons and episodes. 2.1 Multiple properties (e.g. to Program and Episode) would incline me toward a new TV Soundtrack type, just for clarity.
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TV soundtrack is now live.
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I started work on the following...
http://www.freebase.com/view/user/thadguidry/default_domain/musical_symbol
http://www.freebase.com/view/m/02wxngb/-/user/thadguidry/default_domain
http://www.freebase.com/view/user/thadguidry/default_domain/musical_note_family
http://www.freebase.com/view/m/0gwrp_s/-/user/thadguidry/default_domain
http://www.freebase.com/view/m/0gwr2nf/-/user/thadguidry/default_domain
I based the above on semantics from various sources including, various Purdue.edu music programmes, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clef), and LenMus data elements (http://www.lenmus.org/sw/docbook/en/ch02.html)
One concern is figuring out where to split off those 3 Clef group properties such as Clef Pitch placement, Clef Line placement,and Clef symbol used. Go with a mediator ? or a Type ?
Any other thoughts ?
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You should use a sibling relationship CVT for the "exact symbol meaning of" property. Otherwise you won't be able to have it reciprocate.
The property "clef symbol used" is confusing, since it points back to the same type. Are clefs really symbols? I mean, the G-, F-, and C-clef symbols clearly are. But are the clefs that use them (e.g. treble, bass, alto, etc.) really symbols? It doesn't seem like it to me -- it seems like they're what the symbol denotes. Most of the properties on this type seem to refer to these clefs (as opposed to the clef symbols); I'd recommend moving them to a new "clef' type.
The type name "Music notation element" is a bit unclear, i think, since these seem to be categories of notation symbols. Maybe "Music notation symbol category" would be clearer (if somewhat verbose), or perhaps just "music symbol category" if something more concise is needed (are there other kinds of musical symbols besides those used in notation? If not, I'd go with the short version.)
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Yeah, I knew about creating the sibling relationship, but somehow with the new client (old/new), I have lost my practical skills on how to do that. Ugh ! HELP Needed on this point.
Yes, agreed that the other clefs are not symbols. Clef is old french for Key and a Clef really just tries to symbolize the key to play in. Of course now we have key signatures that ride along the side of Clefs to handle all that. Music Notation has changed drastically over the last 350 years, btw, and I was trying to help cope with a current and historical perspective, but that might be really confusing in practical use because of mixed signals across the concepts themselves.
I was just quickly organizing thoughts and data to begin modelling, hence the user typing. Yes, the remaining 4 clef properties are good candidates for moving into a domain specific Type such as "Clef" or "Music Clef" (Depending on how many medical experts complain about using "Clef" as in clef pallet) and the reason why I began each one with "clef", since I knew a new type was rearing its head there.
"Music notation element" is a bit unclear, but element is used in a few databases and XML signatures towards Music and I was just keeping that vibe going. It can be changed certainly, if the element is really just trying to categorize or group or cluster the symbols.
I will work on all this a bit more, and spend more research time on it. (Just like I did on Ports base, which needs more attention and I have good feedback from some Port Authority directors now via email) Too much work and not enough time in the day !
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RE: music notaion element or "music symbol category" -
I can think of a few cases of other kinds or types of music symbols used outside of standard notation. Things pertaining to the Music Audio engineering world (electronic tone charts & early MIDI symbols), as well as perhaps Guitar Tablature (depending on if you consider Tablature a music notation style or not) Opinions on that point ? Is someone working on representing Guitar Tablature ? Perhaps that is best left as a separate discussion....since we can always connect the dots on the graph later with "concepts" or ontologies later.
http://guitar.about.com/od/tabchordslyrics/ss/read_guitar_tab_6.htm seems to represent "slurs" , glissando / portamento also, but with a different meaning in the guitar world called a "pull-off" and "slide" respectively, which I would say has a similar looking symbol, but debatable in meaning (but I might be wrong) as the "slur" , etc. on this page, about halfway down http://www.dolmetsch.com/musicalsymbols.htm
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http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory1.htm
The above is one of the major reference sources I am using to help with modeling and in the new new client, the internationalization, I hope.
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OK, the Music Clef type has a life now, and completely open to changes as more research dictates: http://www.freebase.com/schema/type/user/thadguidry/default_domain/music_clef
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Cool. Lots of those properties should be unique, though.
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Interesting, I was only able to make 1 of them unique, the other integer property, I could not.
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(Computer ate my response; my apologies if there end up being two of these.)
You probably have data in the other property. You can either delete the data or update the uniqueness via MQL.
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I vote for the latter as it is relatively easy:
{ "id": "/user/thadguidry/default_domain/music_clef/", "/type/property/unique": { "value": "true" "connect": "replace" } }
I'm pretty sure it's 'replace' for boolean values.
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I made a small stab at trying to organize Music Notation System's and gave it a single property (thus far) for categorization. I really hate to overload semantics there however, and am worried about using the existing "Symbol" topic instead of creating a new "Symbol notation" topic. Same goes for "Color", when perhaps it really should be "Color notation" as a new topic that could then have a link for /common/topic/subjects "Color" ? I have my own personal opinions of best practices for Semantic Web usage. And the delegated subjects issue is still not validating very well for me in Freebase. (we really need to clear that up with SKOS concepts, and a really good debate on all that, once and for all, in the open.) Anyways...Opinions needed on this point about overloading or not...
http://www.freebase.com/view/user/thadguidry/default_domain/music_notation_system
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Arguably "cipher notation", "color notation", etc. are distinct concepts from those of "cipher" and "color". Patterns of usage on this sort of thing vary in Freebase, but that's my general take.
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Yeah, so when I say "Color" as the category...I mean THIS identifier that represents the topic (loose concept) of Color.
When I say "Symbol" as the category...I mean THIS identifier that represents the topic (loose concept) of Symbol.
I did not see a topic of "Cipher" that meant THIS identifier that represented what I needed....so I created one, and gave it a very good description based on current Music Notation Systems classification (Indiana.edu academic John Gibson helped me here via an email question).
In retrospect of the above thinking.... I think the current layout and examples I have are "extremely close" to the same Freebase identifier meaning. When they differ from a Freebase topic, that is when I create NEW topics. (Then arguably those new topics could be linked to SKOS Concepts if or when they are available). ;) Further thoughts ? I want to get it "right" and "generally approved". ;)
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I'm new here. On a much less technical note, the image for key signature does not actually show a key signature, but how B major would be notated without a key signature. The first Wikipedia image would probably work better for you here.
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Yeap, some of the images are not a good representation of the actual entity being Typed or trying to be Conceptualized. My /user types are a start to help in that direction. I will see if I can find a better image that represents a "key signature" as it pertains to Western Music Standard Notation. Keep in mind that Freebase is "international" and we can have concepts of earlier "key signature" (Like the Clef symbol itself being moved up or down on the staff, and even other concepts of a "key signature" outside of Western Music Standard Notation, such as in Indian or Oriental music.
Wanna help ?
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I think they are the same concept, surely. But we are not talking concepts, but Topics in Freebase. Sill I think the 2 topics, "Scorewriter" and "Music notation software" are aliases for each other.
What do others think ?
What is the history of the word "Scorewriter", that would probably be a good question to ask and resolve an answer, correct ?
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I really see no interesting differences between the two topics, seems Scorewriter has gotten all of the love on WP. I question why on WP was the article redirect that existed for about 5 years, from the former article to the latter article, removed? The explanation makes no sense to me ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Music_notation_software&action=history ). I'd be inclined towards a merging of the two and possibly re-establishing the redirect on WP.
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So I added the 425 persons in the Bassist profession to the /music/bassist type. Ugh ! But I don't think this guy could have ever played the bass guitar. haha. Bass guitars were not invented until after 1900 we know.
I think what will help is to make sure we distinguish with Bassist (contrabass, etc..) from a Bassist (bass guitar player) somewhere in the type system.
HELP !
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Well, it's going to get very hard to manage if we are that strict in typing in creating distinct bass guitarist, acoustic bassist & etc. types. I can imagine all sorts of erroneously typed musicians. These are all bassists, yes, just like Paul McCartney is a bassist, so I'd then co-type them as /musicians who play the double bass (contrabass) like in this view: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/double_bass/-/music/instrument/instrumentalists. That seems adequate to me. Or is it that he plays the older more archaic contrabass? Type them as that then.
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Ah, Gordon, I think what your idea of "These are all bassists" is coming from "someone who knows how to play a bass line" ?
Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassline which are used even in classical music, such as the pedal part of a Baroque organ, but it could just as easily be played by an Electric Bass guitarist.
So what I am trying to do, is understand what direction the /music/bassist Type is trying to go or specifically "what properties are we going to try to collect under /music/bassist" ?
I agree about being too strict... but unfortunately, it already looks like the description of the Type is headed towards that strictness... unless we change it or loosen it up a bit. "A Bassist is a person who plays a double bass or electric bass (also referred to as bass guitar). He or she may also be a Musical Artist or a Musical Group Member. This type has no properties of its own."
Hence my trying to understand the direction we are trying to achieve.
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No, I'm in agreement with the type bassist, and the description seems very close to what I meant (or was trying to state) that we are discussing stringed instruments meant for playing the lower octave notes, either through the use of a bow or fingers (bass guitar, double bass/contrabass are the two examples I mentioned and are mentioned in the type bassist as well). Then to be more specific we use the musician type to add the specific instruments played (electric bass guitar or double bass) and now you are getting down to the brass tacks (so to speak). Could the bassist type be more than a bucket type, certainly, what exactly would be helpful there? I can't think of anything specific enough to be added to the bassist type that doesn't exist already elsewhere (eg. musician).
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Specifically, the description of the type could be improved. If your really meaning a bucket type for "someone who knows how to play a string instrument for playing the lower octave notes" then why not SAY that in the description. Instead of mentioning the specific instruments themselves ? That was my point. That it is really just a bucket type for "someone who knows how to play a bassline, with a stringed instrument".
Perhaps just fix the description and remove the mentions of specific instruments, then it would be a real bucket type and not so strict. As the type is described now (read it) and until you change the description, it does not seem to allow inclusion of any non-guitar players. Yes / No ?
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The type is really just a legacy of the old Freebase style of bucket types… I’m not convinced it serves any real purpose. Even the Guitarist type, at least, has a property for the guitars played. I would not spend much energy on populating this type, and would even vote in favor of its deletion if no one cares to add more properties to it.
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Current description:
"A Bassist is a person who plays a double bass or electric bass (also referred to as bass guitar). He or she may also be a Musical Artist or a Musical Group Member. This type has no properties of its own."
I must not be writing/thinking too clearly today, as it seems the final line is pretty clear in it's meaning (This type has no properties of its own) and I thought I was moderately coherent in my earlier posts (though maybe again, not so clear?). The two examples listed in the first line cover all the common instruments for a stringed bass instrument. I'd not think this type is meant for for musicians who play low-octave wind instruments, horns or drums. If I am confusing anyone (including myself) my apologies. Maybe the description should add that specialization of instrument(s) played could be best made with the 'musician' type (I don't believe the Role property on Musical Group Member is appropriate, right)?
Someone else hopefully can chime in on this?
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Well a divian sazi can play a Bass part similar to an electric Bass guitar (and some divian sazi's are amplified in Turkey). Exotic, yes, but still a stringed bass instrument. Anyways, having no properties under the Type does not mean we should get rid of it, only that the properties are not found yet, who knows what we will discover.
My vote is to leave as is, I guess for now.
Or extend the description to say : "...plays a double bass or electric bass (also referred to as bass guitar) or is trained to read and play a bass line". (formally or informally, self training is OK)
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I'm with @crism on this one. This is a legacy type that I don't see a whole lot of value in. Can someone propose a property unique to bassists (whatever the definition) that makes them substantially semantically different from a musician who happens to play an instrument that is classified as a bass?
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I think the the list of properties of musical genre type is too poor. It only have : Name Image ParentGenre SubGenre *Artist
it would be great if it had more important properties like :
*Local of origin (Type : /location/location) With this information we can use the map feature
*Typical instruments (Type : /music/instrument)
*Year/Decade of origin With this information we can use the timeline feature
*Relevant Music (Type : /music/track) This way we can add relevant music to the topic . Like the first music of the genre or the music that genre that was most successful
Thanks! Mateus
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As I'm sure most member so this base are aware, Mozart set lyrics for K. 524 in multiple languages:
in Italian: titled: 'Quando miro quel bel ciglio nero' in English: titled 'As upon those lovely features' in German: titled 'An Chloë'
I'm loading some (more) data on Mozart compositions; how should such compositions ie songs with multiple sets of lyrics be represented in Freebase using existing structures?
Simon
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And what composition types shoudl they have?
English = song German = Lied Italian =
?
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I don't think there is a good solution in the current schema, but I've cross-posted to the Music domain where the question is more likely to be seen by someone who might know.
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This is tricky. Did Mozart actually set different texts to the same melody? If so, IMO, then those are actually different Compositions. The next easiest case is that Mozart set one text, later translated by other people. In that case, the Composition is just the one with the original text. The others should be different Compositions, with music composed by Mozart, and lyrics by the translator. The difficult case is if Mozart himself set multiple translations to the same music; I’m not sure what the best way to handle that would be. However, (not being a Mozart nerd), most of the information I can find about K. 524 refers to it only as “An Chloë,” based on a text by Johann Georg Jacobi. That suggests that the alternates are all later translations, and thus not the same as K. 524.
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It seems a bit odd (i.e.: contrary to common-sense) that if someone translates the words of a song or puts new words to tune then that represents a new composition by that composer!
Maybe lyrics aren't a defining part of a composition. As the word is used day-to-day it seems to refer more to the music than the words. Maybe all the various sets of lyrics and translations should be should be part of the (one) musical composition.
Simon
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It does seem a bit odd… but on the other hand, “99 Red Balloons” and “99 Luftballons” are different songs that people may wish to discuss discretely. However, the Arrangement type doesn’t seem appropriate when the music is exactly the same.
I’ve actually felt for a while that compositions with lyrics need to borrow from Written Work… this is another case in favor of that. However, it’s not just translations; consider covers (for instance, Tori Amos’s cover of “Heart of Gold” changes the lyrics), or even alternate versions (the two versions of the Velvet Underground’s “New Age”). So far, I’ve modeled these as Arrangements, and it seems to work.
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Hmm...
Using Written work could be good esp. when the lyrics are (taken from) a poem etc. which has an existence in its own right. I'm not populating that, at present, although for some music I do have some data on it.
Related issue: folksongs: I guess each should be a separate topic with each particular version (words and/or music) as a arrangement ? (or adaptation?) ??
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I have been thinking a lot about folk songs… at some point, I think we will need a base for them all their own.
To me, there is a difference between a text written by one specific person (_e.g._ Jacobi’s “An Chloë”) and then translated by other specific people, and a folk text with minor variations (_e.g._ “Cork and Kerry mountains,” “far-fam’d Kerry mountains,” “Kilgary mountain” from “Whiskey in the Jar”—and don’t get me started on sea chanteys). But some people may care—which version did the Dubliners sing?
The Arrangement type was set up to allow this to be flexible. Strictly, the live version and album version of a rock ’n’ roll song are almost always slightly different arrangements—but no one cares. Recordings of jazz standards may vary wildly, but that’s just what’s expected. But if someone does care at that level of detail, they can factor out the different arrangements accordingly. I think that that approach can handle lyrical variations as well; if someone really does care to catalog all the lyrical variations of “Whiskey in the Jar,” they can do so using the Arrangement type.
This needs some more thought… although Written Work would be a good way to correlate variant lyrics and translations, the problem remains that pairing the words with the music requires the Composition or something similar. It’s tricky… anyone other than simonhill or me have an opinion or ideas about this?
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I've done some research on the history of both film music and video game music. I couldn't find any topics on that. If you like I could add some info if that would become possible.
kind regards, Than
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Well, it's there:
(see the type /film/soundtrack which is a property of the type /film/film as a collection here: http://www.freebase.com/view/music/soundtrack )
And for music in video games, it might be a good idea to have a soundtrack/score for video games, I'd suggest discussing that in the video games commons.
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Tori Amos’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” includes recorded speech from George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and her father. It doesn’t seem the same as a sample to me. By analogy with Archive footage in the Film domain, I’ve created Archive recording. Is there a better way to do this? It does still leave the recorded speakers typed as Musical Artists, which seems inappropriate, but I can’t find a better way to credit them.
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Several bases and my own personal project from years ago all center around the beloved topic of Music videos, it's time to add to a commons domain a set of types and properties. I propose moving the existing Music Video type with these properties:
Music Video: -Initial release date - > date/time (unique) -Song -> Composition (unique?) -Artist -> Musical Artist (or Musical Video Artist with included type of Musical Artist) -Performers (i.e. people in the video) -> [maybe with a role mediator?Musical Video Performance] -> Person -Director -> Musical Video Director -Choreographer -> Music Video Choreographer (Person included) -Other crew -> (like /film/film_crew_gig) -> Person
Missing anything?
Is it a good idea to have this part of the Music commons? I believe so, as music videos are integral in the marketing and promotion of music artists and their work.
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Should a music video also be a short film?
Should there be a connection to a track, rather than or in addition to a song? Most videos are set to a particular track from an album or single; live videos are an exception, as are the few videos that use alternate takes.
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Chris Maden (crism) commented on your post on Freebase:
/m/0ddj0nb
Should a music video also be a short film?
We've determined they aren't, that music videos mostly are their own unique thing for the most part, though some do resemble films very closely in nature. From our current definition of /film/film on the wiki:
_Music Videos and Music Video Compilations may resemble films in having actors, dialogue, plot but are almost always specific promotional video(s) for a specific song(s) or set of songs if a medley (e.g.: Thriller, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, November Rain, Depeche Mode's 1988 compilation of videos called Strange).
As of this time we have no commons type for music videos. _Should there be a connection to a track, rather than or in addition to a song? Most videos are set to a particular track from an album or single; live videos are an exception, as are the few videos that use alternate takes.
I think it would be extremely difficult at best. If you can convince me we could do it reasonably easily I would go for it.
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Figuring out which track a particular video uses seems like it would be extremely hard, lacking any thumbprints, wouldn't it?
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There are certain Themes and Subjects that are represented with Music Videos (the audio and video experience) that simply can't be exposed, known, or captured in just the song (just the audio experience), so I'd like to account for that, just as we do with /film/film_subject. With that said, I think it's a good idea to keep the Media Genre, Topic Subject, etc. separate from the Song -> Musical Genre, since that keeps the audio experience separate from the video experience with it's additional subjects, themes, genres.
http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/Bob+Dylan/It's+Unbelievable--2162071;_ylt=AjeclQB412mZDTVde63HuzPesyUv Category: Guitar Hero 5
Guitar Hero 5 is not a Theme, Category, Subject, or even Media Genre to me, but simply a Triple assertion in that Guitar Hero 5 (the video game) CONTAINS the song that happens to also have a music video created for it.
But perhaps "Teen Angst" or "Young Love" is a Theme depicted in that video experience that isn't known about or captured in the audio experience ?
(terrible example, I know, and I'm sure others could think of a much better example, but it just happened to pop up on my music video search in Yahoo, but hopefully you get the general idea of the separation there)
So, how and where do we want to handle linking "Themes and Subjects and Genres" as it pertains to Music Videos ?
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I want to build a dabase of classical compositions linking in to composers and the draft music catalogs etc. There's no point in loading up references to wrong catalogs for a composer.
Am I correct in thinking that I will need to (and should) use a propbox template to take a catalog number input in the form used by people (e.g. D 550) and validate it against the base of music catalogs - resolve any ambiguity - and treat as a link to the music catalog 'Deutsch Number'.
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I'd recommend coordinating with Raymond Yee since he's been looking at the BWV numbers.
I don't understand the reference to "propbox template" since the samples I looked at on Wikipedia didn't seem to use infoboxes. Did I just pick the wrong composer or are you referring to something else.
Whatever the source though, you're right that the catalog number needs to be qualified by the catalog. You could do this either as a property on a composition type that you define that expects an object (CVT) with a tuple of the catalog and the number or you could define an enumeration namespace to make sure that all the values are unique. This could be something like /base/catalog//. This will guarantee that a single catalog number never gets used more than once.
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Thanks, I've made contact with Raymond Yee and hope to benefit from his good advice.
I was thinking that Opus Number and catalog Number should be properties of the composition. Opus Number (almost certainly) unique and Catalog Number multiple.
Its a real pain to load/enter catalog numbers in two parts - catalog and number; they are usually thought of as a single entity e.g. D.550 and it would good if they could be entered in that form for Freebase to validate and separate out if necessary.
I was thinking more of making sure the works for a composer got a catalog abbreviation which had been defined for that composer, rather than making sure the catalog number is unique; but, of course, you are right, any validation, should do both.
I found a propbox write up here at http://propbox.daepark.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/ but maybe I've got completely the wrong end of the stick? Which Freebase toolset would be best for 'processing' opus and catalog data input?
Regards,
Simon
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Re uniqueness of opus numbers: According to Wikipedia, the opus numbers of Johann Christian Bach's compositions vary from publisher to publisher (e.g., there are three compositions numbered Op. 18). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_number).
I understand the desire not to have to enter the catalog and number separately, but by doing so, you lose any way of linking instances of the Music catalog type to the compositions therein. The difficulty of loading them separately, however, is largely only an issue if you're loading them through the main UI; even a simple tool like the list importer can handle the split version pretty painlessly.
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Hi Simon,
Could we make a list of some of the music catalogs that are around? I'm familiar with BWV. But what other ones come to mind? Is it a huge list?
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Hi Raymond, I've already made a base and loaded up the about the top 100 music catalogs in http://www.freebase.com/view/base/catalog/views/music_catalogs
(This supports an add-on I have made for Songbird - to get lieder lyrics from The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, allowing me to extract catalog nos from song names and to help identify composer).
I think there a plenty more catalogs but for increasingly obscure composers. With the catalogs structure in place, there's nothing to stop anyone adding their favourites to the base.
Next goal: structure allowing (valid) opus and catalog number(s) to be associated with any composition.... I'm struggling with ways to make sure the data added isn't rubbish (actually, 'is not inconsistent with what's already in Freebase').
Simon
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I'm building a base to illustrate the issues: http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/user/simonhill/default_domain/cataloged_composition
So far:
1) Should each opus number be prefaced by 'Opus' (looks nice, I think) or should 'opus' be assumed? 2) what about posthumous works ('opus Posth.') and 3) without opus ('ohne opus') (i.e. has no opus, not 'we haven't put in yet') 4) should check ?(and can it be enforced) uniqueness of opus number - (other than 'ohne opus', of course) 5) how to ensure parts of a work are given opus numbers sensible in context of including work. e.g. Four Seasons 6) how should 'includes' pieces be named ? (a number or 'movement' and number does not give a very helpful composition name for the (sub-) piece in itself (how many mvmt 1's would there be!) ; prefixed by the work name is duplicative and will give problems with heavily nested pieces ). Practical solution: use name, if it has one, otherwise make unique by including enough 'including' info?
Plenty (too much!) food for thought...
Simon
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I've taken the liberty of starting a page on the Freebase wiki to consolidate our conversation: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Music_Catalog I've copied over some of the issues and will continue to add to the page, especially what I've learned in terms of modeling BWV, a specific catalog. Simon: would you be willing to work on the wiki too?
My general reaction right now is that it'd be great to come up with a good model to handle all these classical music catalogs so that we don't have to model each catalog separately. A major issue I'm grappling with is understanding how all these catalogs work: to what degree they follow all the same pattern, what that general pattern is precisely, what exceptions there are, and to what degree those exceptions matter. From my personal point of view, this catalog scheme would work well enough to support BWV before I'd drop my BWV-specific modeling, and since I'd like to see a general model if possible, I'll be using BWV as one filter. I'm also starting to look in detail at other specific examples, such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6chel_catalogue (Mozart) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Richard_Wagner
More soon.
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For one thing, I'd suggest making the catalog property enumerated, and then adding all the known (in Freebase already) catalog systems for all the major composers. They seem to roughly follow the same pattern, but some use alphanumeric classification, some strictly numerical. One seems to classify by type of composition, then a numerical ordering.
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Can the enumerated property link to a table, or is it just a fixed list?
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Generally it would link to another type. For instance, a person's gender is an enumerated property linking to the type "Gender".
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Generally it would link to another type. For instance, a person's gender is an enumerated property linking to the type "Gender".
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Skud: that sounds promising.
The Catalog Numbers for a work are each a catalog abbreviation for that composer (from music catalogs base) with some additional text (digits and maybe a suffix. .e.g. D 550) .
Doable?
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I'm not sure that music catalogs are a great candidate for being an enumeration. The main reasons for using enumerated types (that I know of) are when there's a very limited natural set of options (like gender), or a dataset with a constrained list of categories (something like the specific ethnicity options of a given census, say), or a larger (but still constrained) type where there's a concern about (or history of) users adding incorrect instances (the list of Olympic-recognized sports is one example). In this case, I'd posit that there are an unknown number of possible catalogs, and that it's pretty unlikely that users are going to add invalid ones, simply because music catalogs are a fairly specialized area of knowledge. (Confusion within the set is still likely, such as with the various editions of the Köchel catalogue, but that's an issue even if it is enumerated.)
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I've come round to thinking/realising that catalog name needs to be a separate property (so that cataloged entries can be accessed from the catalog topic)
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Sorry - premature posting!
Thanks for teh advice so far - I can't help but think relationally and I really struggle with Freebase data modelling!
I've come round to thinking/realising/understanding the advice:
that catalog name needs to be a separate property (so that cataloged entries can be accessed from the catalog topic) and as some catalogs have multiple abbreviations (e.g. Kochel: K, sometimes KV) So the reference needs to be stored in terms of the catalog not (one of) its abbreviation(s) - which could be ambiguous anyway.
I can see that the full catalog number D550 is not an enumeration - but maybe the catalog name Deutsch can/should be?
Therefore catalog entry value has to be separate short text
I will try) to combine these in a CVT ('music catalog entry') and allow multiple of these on a 'cataloged composition' type - which has an included type of 'composition'. Job done!
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having made a CVT with music catalog and music catalog value, I can't add to it as
'Enumerated properties cannot have reverse properties' but the whole point is to have the catalog entries show up under the catalog topic - removing the reverse link would defeat that.
And removing the enumeration would mean that anyone can choose anything as a a music catalog!
Huh?
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I don't understand the error message, but I agree with Jeff that an enumeration is probably not a good idea here. Having people be able to pick "anything" isn't really as big a problem as it might seem. It allows them to add a catalog that you've never heard of and, since it types them as a Music catalog as a side effect, you can get a list of them all and clean up any that really are wrong.
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If you provide a link to the type in question, it'll be easier for others to help you troubleshoot it. :)
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Of course, apologies. My current best attempt is here:
http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/user/simonhill/default_domain/catalogued_composition_3
It seems structurally right and works OK but:
1) usability: : selecting a catalog by name, for a cataloged composition, is very awkward through the default UI. The catalogs topics have terrible names you can't deduce from the abbreviation (e.g Vivaldi; "P' numbers known as 'Pincherle'; catalog name = 'Antonio Vivaldi et la musique instrumentale Tome II: Inventaire thématique', i.e. the title of Pincherle's book).
Maybe I should change the music catalog topic names to the common name for the catalog (or some amalgam of common-name, composer and abbreviation!) and add a link to a 'book type' to hold a reference to the published work.
2) 'even though it set as disambiguating on 'music catalog, 'abbreviation' does not show up beside 'music catalog' on the lists of catalogs in : the music catalogs for a cataloged composer http://www.freebase.com/view/m/0bb1fb7 and the list of ttries under the 'cataloged compositions' type on a composition . see : http://www.freebase.com/view/base/imslp/23080
I guess I have to get 'abbreviation' linked onto 'music catalog entry'.
Now to try writing from MQL...
Regards,
Simon
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Changing the catalog names to their most commonly-used names (and putting any other names and abbreviations in as aliases) would make sense to me.
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The abbreviation is showing up from the composer page: http://www.freebase.com/view/en/antonio_vivaldi#/base/catalog/cataloged_composer. It isn't showing up on the cataloged composition page because the relationship between the catalog and the composition is mediated by a CVT; the client only shows the disambiguators on the expected type (which is the CVT), and not of the other types that are also connected to the CVT (which are actually two steps away from the topic being viewed, even though the CVT makes them look like they're only one step away).
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I'm currently catching up on the discussion so far.
1) To what degree do we think that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_number captures a lot of the complexity around opus numbers? Do we think we're going to be able to come up with a simple model that handles the vast majority of catalog numbers with a few edge cases or are there going to be lots of edge cases?
2) I edited the BWV abbreviation to not include BWV Anh since I think the Anh is part of the number (to name pieces in the BWV appendix.) Am I mistaken here?
3) To look at some the current data structures look from the point of view of MQL, here's a query to get the works that have been tagged in the BWV catalog:
[{ "id": "/en/bwv", "type": "/base/catalog/music_catalog", "catalog_entries": [{ "id": null, "type": "/user/simonhill/default_domain/mce2", "music_catalog_value": null, "cataloged_composition": [{ "id": null }] }] }]
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So far, I haven't found any catalog cases too far off the main model. Once I got head around the multiplicity of
composition --> multiple catalogs --> multiple abbreviations -->value composition --> multiple opus numbers
I can't see how it could get much worse!
Structurally, I'm thinking MCE2 and catalogued compoistion 3 are about as good as I can get. So baring any new input (request/comments/advice), I'll go with them and tidy them up , names, descriptions, get rid of rubbish, etc. over the next week or so. Then it can be proper 'working draft'.
The BWV data looks good and, I think, would fit the new structures easily. (Not so sure how to load it, though) . I've been trying Gridworks: it is fantastic but I'm finding it very hard to set up a schema skeleton in it (=no documentation and not in the video!).
Meanwhile, I'm working on the Deutsch catalog of Schubert (one of my favourite composers!)
I'm having pretty good success with writing to Freebase via MQL from local javascript. Only the more tricky properties to sort: key, genre, lyrics_webpage and I'll be able to actually write composition a full set catalog entries (in the sand).
I'd also like to to be able to write to 'part_of' but that will take some more figuring out and come later.
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Just a warning that I will probably rebuild the new structures in the catalog/base (soon) and any data loaded into the current base will be lost, so view it as a test bed only.
(You can't test on the structures in the current sandbox, because the sandbox was not updated this week.)
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Just in case anyone else is interested:
The structures now in place for catalogs and cataloged compositions are Ok to use.
I have been busy on 'other things' but I hope to get back to populating classical compositions in a couple of months.
Simon
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Thanks, Simon.
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I'm not sure what's been going on here, but it looks like Aaron has a number of untitled albums (at least one of which was created without a title), some of which have untitled songs?
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Check explore, and check MusicBrainz. His albums are in Chinese (per MusicBrainz) and their titles do not have any significant Latin characters, and so we have no English titles for them.
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OK, fair enough. Though I note that there are some Releases of Albums which display Chinese characters: see /m/01qfjpp, Releases. What about if Freebase generally displayed Chinese characters if there were no Latin characters available?
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I don’t know about the more recently-imported releases. Under the old regime, MusicBrainz only had releases and artists, and the albums were implied from the releases. MusicBrainz now has releases and albums, and I don’t know how Freebase interprets the linguistic information associated with those. It might be nice if the Freebase Web client had the intelligence to pick the most appropriate name for a topic if a name in the preferred language were unavailable, but I suspect that’s a ways down the road.
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OK, thanks - good to know.
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can we add dates for when a work was composed (start, end)? i'd like to start building timeline visualizations of this. this is particularly applicable to classical music but could be generally useful. for instance a timeline of brahms's symphonys (it took him ~14 years to write it because he felt so pressured coming after beethoven's 9th).
secondly - place composed (probably non unique) would be interesting for mapping the works composed. for example - dvorak's new world symphony and american string quartet, and mapping liszt's travels. in general there's quite a lot of data on location composed particularly for classical music that we could easily structure.
thirdly - and this is more complicated, at least for classical music, we should capture the catalog ID - which for many composers is an opus, number combination, but for mozart it was K for Ludwig Ritter von Köchel and haydn and bach also had their own thing.
fourthly - we should also capture key for classical compositions.
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and some more ideas:
to whom the composition was dedicated is often interesting.
who (person, or sometimes entity such as the san francisco opera) commisioned the work is also often interesting.
location, date, and performer of the premeir is also often interesting.
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As with most good user suggestions, I will say: Go try it out!
The question of catalog keys is easiest. Go make /user/arielb/koechel, and create an enumerated property for a Mozart composition type. Other notable catalogs (Schickele) can be similarly modeled. Opus numbers could be a machine-readable string, but probably on a Classical composition type; other compositions do not tend to have those.
The key, dedication, commission, première, all seem like good properties for classical compositions as well.
The date and place of composition is an interesting challenge, an example of a frequent modeling challenge in Freebase. Representing this information complicates the model when done properly; one really wants the composer-composition relationship to be a CVT. However, most compositions don’t have this information readily available, making it an unnecessary composition. Would it be acceptable to have the date(s) and place of composition simply depending from the composition itself? That would mean, for example, that one could not correctly describe compositions begun by one composer and completed by another.
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ok - i'll look into the catalog numbers seperately in a classical music domain once i get around to it.
i set up a user domain for dedications (Dedicated Work). I think this could be generally useful (applied to literature and what not) and does not need to be directly tied to composition.
Place of composition should likely be non unique since there are numerous instances where the composer travelled while writing the piece. I think for modeling place composed similar to places lived is sufficient. Similarly, capturing a start and end date is also likely sufficient. Modelling compositions begun by one composer and finished by others is basically just hard (see this example) and happens infrequently enough that i think if someone cared enough they could break out the variant completions into seperate compositions. but for simplicity's sake, i think just having a date begun, date completed pair on the composition itself would help capture lots of useful data.
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Been thinkin about the right way to handle place and dates of composition.
I think the creation of any work of art (including theater, film, visual art, whatever) should be considered a /project/project with the /music/composition being the /project/project_focus. This allows for multiple roles for collaborative works as well as start/end dates for each role and subsection. I would go as far to say that every major work of art should have a property that points to the project of it's creation.
I've been trying to figure out if a creative process deserves to be a child class of /project/project, but I can't think of a compelling reason.
Now, location isn't so much a property of a composition as it is a property of the composer (or author or sculptor) at the time of their participation in the /project/project. So map Liszt's travels in his own /person/person/places_lived cvt and then you can implicitly figure out where he was when he was involved in the /project/project focusing on each piece. This would require a more detailed places_lived field than most artists currently have, but I think that's a good thing.
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For some compositions, the location composed actually had an impact on the work itself such as String Quartet No. 12. This also enables interesting views of compositions such as Locations for Mozart compositions.
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Micah and I came up with this schema as a way to improve the current Music Festival type. There are three main types here, representing Festival Tours, Festival Events, and Recurring Festivals, which intersect each other to address the various ways in which music festivals are organized:
- Recurring touring festivals (like the original Lollapalooza)
- Recurring non-touring festivals (like the current Lollapalooza)
- One-off festivals (like the original Woodstock)
- One-off touring festivals (I can't think of any examples but they surely exist)
Music Festival Event also connects to the Concert schema, so that performers and set lists can be entered, and the schema connects to Musical Artist in a couple ways. (Note that because Concert and Musical Artist are commons types, the properties are not reciprocated.)
Comments welcome!
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Question: Where or what type would hold a "Performed At" property, perhaps with a date ?
My use case is the Musical Group, Destino who performed at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and linking to that event, and not a specific venue location or a building, BC Place Stadium, in this case. They also performed at the 2008 Bejing Summer Olympics and I'd like to show that relationship as well.
Showing EVENT performances for festivals, concerts, hayrides, parades, seminars, parties, etc. is what I'm looking for.
I need something more general than Concert, although...thinking...perhaps that is where those types of events for musical performances, no matter what their venue or style, actually need to go in ? Hmm...what about Elvis...
How do you model Elvis Presley who performed at the Lousiana Hayride in Shreveport, LA every Saturday Night under signed contract during that entire year of 1955 at the young age of 19 ? I just want to show that he performed there at least once, and I see little importance for showing all 25 weeks and the specific days. Your mileage and opinions may vary. http://www.elvispresleynews.com/LouisianaHayride.html
Any thoughts on how to correctly show a relationship between a performer in general and an event ?
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The Concert type in the Music commons is best suited -
Destino would have two new concert topics, one for their 2010 Winter Olympics performance and another for their 2008 Summer Olympics performance.
Elvis' contract is really a Recurring Event, and I'd suggest creating a new topic, "Elvis Presley at the Louisiana Hayride", and typing it as /time/recurring_event. Each Saturday night would be a new instance of that recurring event and also typeable with /music/concert. We can then link to the Louisiana Hayride via the concert venue property.
I would create a new topic for every week he performed, just as we create a new Book edition topic for each time a book is published. The topics may be sparse in data, but it keeps the schema & data clean.
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Would a "subjects" property be useful or interesting? I'm thinking partly of all the location-based bases being created, so that they could easily include songs about Halifax, songs about New York, and for that matter, songs about rainbows.
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Absolutely, this property would be useful and essential as I've been searching for just such a property to associate with concept albums that are themed around a single subject by Hawaiian musician Roland Cazimero such as The Musical Saga of the Hokule'a, Pele and Warrior. The best I've been to come up so far is to use the Influence Type under the subject of the album, but I'd like to also have a "subject heading" property for in either the Musical Album or Musical Release Types.
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A "subjects" property was subsequently added to the Composition type.
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Female rapper Shi music can be found at [(http://www.youtube.com/shimusicworld) Shi (Rapper)Shi (Rapper) Shi (Rapper)Shi (Rapper)
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I've built a base of thematic catalogs (for classical composers) http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/user/simonhill/default_domain/thematic_catalog
Does this belong in music commons and/or should there a reciprical link to it for composers?
I'd like to get reference to the database showing up under each composers - without having to have separate (duplicative) composer topics in my db.
I'd be grateful for any help or ideas.
Simon
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If you haven't already, it's definitely worth reading the Commons page on the wiki. Generally, this looks good to me, but a few mostly nitpick comments:
- Documentation: none of the properties of thematic catalog are documented. Musicologist isn't documented at all.
- Documentation part 2: the type description for thematic catalog doesn't really tell me anything that the name of the type doesn't. What is this type for? What sort of things should be typed as this type?
- Musicologist should probably include /people/person.
- Are we sure there are no thematic catalogs which refer to more than one composer?
- Consider if any of the properties should be disambiguators.
- I don't really see the value in having the underscore in the musicologist_s key.
Hope this helps!
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One more thought: is someone who creates a thematic catalog automatically a musicologist? (I have no opinion on this due to a complete lack of knowing what I'm talking about). If not, references to "musicologist" should probably become "thematic catalog creator".
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I second Phil's comment about musicologist. Most musicologists haven't created a thematic catalog, so it would seem a bit odd to have a type for musicologists with only one property which didn't related to the majority of them. (There are lots of commons types with properties that only apply to some of the instances, but those properties aren't typically the only property of the type.) In general, though, I think this would be a useful schema to have in the commons.
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I think anyone who creates a thematic catalog is almost certainly, in fact, a musicologist but most musicologists do not create catalogs, so I'll change 'musicologist' in the schema to 'thematic catalog creator'.
'Thematic Catalog creator' could then be usefully picked up by anyone who wants to build a base of musicologists.
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A further thought: if big changes to the music structures are planned for the next few months should I hold off doing this?
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The changes under consideration are discussed on our wiki, here. I'm not sure how much of what you're considering would affect or be affected by them (although certainly just creating a schema for thematic catalogs shouldn't affect anything).
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It looks like few changes are proposed which impact on classical music (a pity), which us where most of this catalog stuff would impact.
I would like to see a single structure for 'classical' music compositions which links to composer (obviously) and catalog. That would be the framework on which other bases (opera, works by composer, songs etc. ). could hang.
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I think this is a good idea. Some thoughts:
1) It would indeed be beneficial to link composers with their associated catalogs. It would also be good to enable compositions to be associated with their catalog numbers.
2) It would be better for the type to be called Music Catalog rather than Thematic Catalog. "Music catalog" seems to be the more general term and is consistent with Wikipedia e.g. wikipedia's article on the Köchel catalogue is in the Music catalogs category. (As I understand it, a thematic catalog is a kind of music catalog which indexes work by its opening notes -- But i am not a Musicologist!)
3) Expanding on (1) above, if a composition can only be in one catalog (that being the one associated with the composer) then a text field would suffice e.g. "K525" for Eine kleine Nachtmusik. However, it seems likely that more than one catalog could contain the same work, in which case perhaps there should be (following my proposed terminology) a Music Catalog Entry type to link Compositons with Music Catalogs.
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I think you are right, I'll change the name (back!) to! 'music catalogs' , a.s.a.p.
Compositions can be in more than 1 catalog, ie. can have multiple catalog numbers in different catalogs) but, generally, catalog numbers refer to only 1 composition (an exception I know about being for Posthumous works which are (all) given the Opus numbr 'Posth.' (Not much help identifying the piece, but as opus numbers are meant to represent the composer's compositions in order or writing/publication, I suppose no more can be said!)
There is a good starting point for a structure for compositions for Bach, I've asked Raymond Yee (rdhyee) (see http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000012efdc60?_since=2009-12-21T21%3A25%3A20.0015Z ) if he would collaborate on this and he is quite keen to do some work on the BWV numbers. I've no idea how to generalize that into a structure anyone can use to hold any composer's works- with appropriate catalog numbers on them! I think that would be a great backbone for Freebase 'classcal' music data!
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Also, if music catalogs was to be promotd to teh commns, shoud it have additional fields? E.g: date(s0 publication : link to book topic , etc.?
Or could these be (easily) added at a later date?
Simon
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Adding properties can always be done later - the thing we try hard to avoid for Commons types is any changes which may break existing code, but adding properties can't break anything. On the other hand, if you think these properties are likely to be useful, it's always worth getting them in as early as possible.
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Is there a reason why (for example) the various kinds of concerto, such as "Piano concerto" and "Violin concerto", are not included as sub-forms of "Concerto" (at present only the only sub-form of "Concerto" is "Concerto for Orchestra")?
I am new to freebase. I was thinking of adding these relationships but I don't want to "jump in" and mess things up, so I thought I would ask here.
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I was adding to Human Extinction as subject for films and some literature/poems
I would like to add the few tv programs that deal with such a cheerful subject matter like Life After People.
(Or maybe we should just have a media commons type for subject matter of a show or series in TV as well as for songs/compositions. Or just add subject to all the arts that are missing subjects)
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Oh, yes, this should be posted as a suggestion in Media Commons as well.
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Yeah, Jeff and I were talking about this just the other day. There is a proliferation of "X subject" types out there: book subject, film subject, video game subject, visual art subject, etc. I don't know whether we can combine them all or whether we want to or what, but it seems worth thinking about.
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I definitly vote for merging all media into a generic media commons property, or at least merge the types for Art Subject, Film Subject, Written Work Subject into a single Media Subject type and still keep the properties for Film Subject, Art Subject, Book Subject for the Film, Artwork and Written Work types.
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Merging all the "subject" types into one giant "subject" type, with properties for each expected type would probably work. (If we kept all the old keys around, the change might even be transparent to API users.) One caveat is that non-commons types expecting a subject would still need Foo Subject types if they wanted the properties to be reciprocated; these types would then have to be merged with Media Subject, rather than simply moved to a new domain, if they were promoted.
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Did we ever really resolve this?
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It's still just a thought, a good one I think.
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I'd like to get some more opinions on this, since there are several type structures with a similar pattern (genres being the main one), so I'm going to ask the data-modelers' list.
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I noticed that "Subjects" and "Subject of" properties were added directly to Topic.
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The majority of Concert Film instances are cotyped Film and Musical Album, something I used to consider an unholy incompatibility. Is it not so?
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I've seen that as well. They really should be split as they are distinct works. Imagine somebody rating the soundtrack -- they probably don't think they are also rating the film, which has many other qualities to it.
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Would it be fair to say that Film and Musical Album are incompatible types, and should therefore never be found applied to the same instances? If so I'll submit the pairing under our incompatible types records.
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Yes. They are incompatible types.
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Musical Artist type has a property for albums and a property for tracks. Is it because there are cases where a musical track will otherwise not be linked to artist through a musical album? If not, then it's considerable duplication and denormalization.
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Even under the current approach, there are albums by multiple artists, and it is only via the track/artist relationship that the credit for the track can be noted. In addition, the only reason why track credit is not explicit was the fear of graph primitive usage that prevailed when the model was first developed. For the data I’ve entered manually, I’ve normalized all of the track/artist relationships.
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From the Musical Album Documentation:
"There should be no “various artists” pseudo-artist in Freebase; multi-artist compilations should simply have no value for this property."
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Hi,
I'd like to request a language property be added to Composition to indicate the language of the lyrics (if any). This would enable queries such as "Spanish songs".
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I think that compositions should be co-typed as Written Works if they have any significant properties thereof. It’s not just languages, but subjects, etc. It introduces some redundancies, but if we were to delegate lyricist to author, that would get cleared up…
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Is that really necessary? The majority of song lyrics really aren't literary gems fit for a Written Work label and applicable for its associated properties. Whereas every song with lyrics has a language value. Couldn't we just add a simple property?
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We could delegate the property, I suppose, but once one cares at all about aspects of the text of a song, one is treating it as a written work, and the types really ought to reflect that. (BTW, in what language are Cocteau Twins lyrics? (-: )
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Seeing as some of the Written Works properties will rarely if ever apply to lyrics, why not just delegate what properties are needed and useful to join Composition?
I'm against co-typing song lyrics as Written Works because that would make lyricists Authors, a type that would in turn get so diluted in Freebase to the point where Bernie Taupin may just outrank The Bard in terms of literary contribution!
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I will delegate the subject and language properties from Written Work to Composition, unless anyone objects. Is anyone else even paying attention to this discussion?
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Apparently not. ;)
Thanks, Chris.
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Sorry, I was out for a couple days. Delegating properties from Written Work will co-type instances of Composition as Written Work (when edited via the client). I'd favor just adding language and subject properties to Composition -- it's a lot more straightforward.
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Yuck, sez I. What is the point of delegating if it coerces types? However, it further supports my point that a Composition is a Written Work if it has lyrics. Do you share Faye’s opposition to co-typing?
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I can see the appeal of it. But I do share Faye's concern that doing so would dilute the meaning of the already somewhat dilute Author type -- seeing songs listed among the various novels, plays, poems, essays, articles, PhD theses and whatnot will probably be confusing to some people.
I can think of at least one practical issue with cotyping them: what to do with poems that have been turned into songs like Blakes "And did those feet in ancient time" which was used as the lyrics for the hymn Jerusalem by Hubert Parry. Would Blake be the author of both the poem and the composition? That would seem weird, but merging the poem and composition also seems very strange, and wouldn't always work -- there have been multiple musical versions of Kipling's A Pict Song, for example.
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Once again, the slippery nature of reality comes into stark conflict with Freebase’s objective model. The lyrics to a song really should be their own, discrete object, and could then be shared by multiple musical settings.
I also considered a new co-type as a compromise. However, one can argue that some musical works without lyrics per se still have language, as they may use words as musical components, and they can certainly have subjects without words. So I will just add these two properties to Composition and have done.
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I have added a Language property and a Subjects property to Composition. I used Book Subject for the target of Subjects; it might be nice to reciprocate the property and possibly change the name of the already misnamed Book Subject.
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I had a sense that this was futile… see Quintette for piano and strings, and a bunch of others. Probably warrants a clean-up task.
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Re slippery nature of reality: Too true. The same problem really pertains to screenplays (teleplays, radioplays), alas.
Re subjects: Subjects are going to be globally improved at some point in the nearish future, but I can simply reciprocate the link for now.
Re futility: Yipes! Sheet music makes the whole model very interesting. Maybe we need a type for sheet music (or scores, or whatever the best generic term is) that includes Written Work, and also links to the composition(s) involved.
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We have too many individual types, mostly for the sake of reciprocal properties. I wouldn't mind if they were all combined into a "media subject" type in the Media Common domain.
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Would it be possibly to generalize Soundtrack so it doesn't expect a Film. There are soundtracks for TV shows and anime, and I could deprecate the Anime OVA Soundtrack type.
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That is a bit odd. The description explicitly says that a soundtrack is for either a film or tv show, but the property is only for film. It seems to me that the options are:
- add a "TV show" property to soundtrack
- create separate types for Film soundtrack and TV soundtrack
- completely generalize the soundtrack type, and create a new type "Media with soundtrack" that will link to it (instead of Film)
I don't especially like #3 (for one, there's a Musical Soundtrack type with slightly different semantics than the film one). On the other hand, we do seem to be missing a video game soundtrack type.
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Yup, 3, generic soundtrack with enumerated soundtrack types would be my favorite, or 1.
TV/Film/Game/Boardgame/Advertisements...
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Hi.
If there is a certain "Music Festival" that is a "Recurring event" (what is fine according to the description), then would it be useful to fill in the "Instance of recurring event" property of the "Event" type to be a self reference?
I understand that there could (or should?) be entries for each single festival (1st, 2nd,... or maybe with the year in the title) as "Event" and that they direct to the general main "Recurring event".
But since this is a Festival too, it has also the Event-Type. Should (or can) this type be removed from the main festival Entry without breaking any integrity?
I hope this makes all any sense.. .:D
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Well, my first question is, which music festival?
Is the music festival actually a recurring event? If so, it should be typed as such, and *not* as event. The instances should be eg. "2009 music festival", "2008 music festival", "2007 music festival", etc.
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Hi.
Just a few examples:
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/wacken_open_air
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/rock_am_ring
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/wave_gotik_treffen
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/download_festival
and so on...
The problem is that anything that is a "Musical Festival" automatically gets an "Event" too on creation. But I just read the "Lassie is an actor but *not* a Person" example in the help section. I think the same idea applies here... And I agree with you that the festival itself should not be an event and the (annual) instances should be one.
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Thomas,
Thanks for all the great work on music festivals. I joined your Woodstock base and will add some data - unfortunately I'm not familiar with the German festivals, so I can't help as much there.
The automatic cotyping of all music festivals as event is based on the fact that many festivals are one-time events (e.g., Live Aid, Woodstock), but one can always remove inappropriate types. If you'd like to clean up these (or other) topics, please select "remove type" from the "more options" drag-down menu under Event.
Thanks so much for your interest in Freebase, and please keep making good suggestions!
Mike -
Hi Mike,
thanks for your help.
As soon as I find the time I will clean the recurring festivals I am aware of and add the yearly instances where it is useful.
I think I will be a regular visitor and contributor to freebase. It's a pretty cool system. :D
And thanks for joining my base. I'm just in the state of exploring the views' capabilities. Sure there is room for many more interesting lists and galleries.
Thomas
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i'm thrown by the event cotype too. over at Conferences and Conventions we distinguish between a conference event and a series with th schema, i dont see why that woldnt work here.
also, why not cotype Performance , Crowd event or something?
I'm in the camp that says if a type has no properties it should be typed higher in the ontology. maybe we should consider this.
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I agree; this type is being used for two different things, which is both confusing and not very useful. There are types for concerts and concert tours that should be moved to the music commons Real Soon Now that might need to integrate with this in some way, too. They seem to be in a draft domain so I can't link to them at the moment.
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Performance is outta whack too. i got some time tonight. i'm gonna try to outdo them
check out the fun base!!
everything you've always wanted!
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this type should be deleted. it is responsible for creating a big mess with event/recurring event.
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At the very least, Event should be removed as an included type. But unless anyone else has suggestions for properties of "Music Festival" that aren't already covered by Event, Recurring Event, Concert, or Concert Tour, I'd tend to agree that we could delete it.
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Why does this type have to provide any properties? Wouldn't it be sufficient to use it as "boolean tag". Because for human editors it is pretty obvious when to apply this type.
I mean there are two possibilities: A single event that is a festival and a recurring event that is a festival (in that case the instances should not be "tagged" as festival). So retrieving the festival title and other related information would require a more complex query... But the festival type would "gracefully degrade" while still adding the information: Is this a so called festival or not?
But the included event type should be removed a.s.a.p. :D
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I've removed "event" as an included type. I don't have a strong feeling about this type, one way or another (I've gone back and forth in my mind a couple tiems since my last post). I do see efi's point that there is some value in being able tell whether something is a "festival" as opposed to other type of concert.
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Another value of having "Music Festival" is discoverability. That's the way users think of these things. Just now I was looking for "Arts Festival" or just "Festival" which don't appear to exist (although there are independent duplicate Festival types in both the Ottawa and Vancouver bases as well as a Ballet Festival).
Using just Recurring Event seems like a very generic way of encoding these things. I'd love to see Festivals more fully fleshed out.
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wanna help out over here?
i'd personally like to see recurring event fleshed out. 'type of', and 'geographical scope' .
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hello, me and hostilefork are working on importing a large amount of music video information, can you reciprocate the music video property?
cheers
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Great idea for a type! We don't typically reciprocate non-commons types from commons types, but I think a Music Video type would be a great candidate for eventual promotion. If you want a reciprocal link in the meantime, you can always create a new "Song" type in your base that would include the commons "composition" (or "song") type.
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Is a track unique to the album that it appears on (as the description seems to imply) or can it appear on multiple albums as long as it is the same recording (as implied by the fact that the schema doesn't have the album property marked as unique)?
I originally was going to suggest that musical album be made a disambiguator, but it might depend on the answer to the above question. Either way, additional disambiguation information is needed to be able to pick out popular tracks from a list. since they generally have no description, so all you see is the name and the type, which is the same for all of them.
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A track can appear on multiple albums if it's the same recording (see Unfinished Sympathy). Recording artist is currently a disambiguator, which should help some. There are lots of non-unique disambiguators kicking around the schemata, so adding album would certainly be possible. But if you're talking about finding them in the autocomplete menu, adding disambiguators won't help -- they don't appear in the autocomplete flyout.
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Hey, welcome back.
I guess I'm confused about what the disambiguation flag actually controls. The help says "use this option when you want the property to appear along with the display name in a list." What kinds of lists do disambiguators appear in? What appears in the auto complete dialog? Is it just the aliases?
The tracks I was looking at were those for Pearl Necklace. Since they appear on a bunch of different compilation albums, I presume that at least some of them are the same recording, even though the lengths vary by a few thousandths of a second. I'm not a big enough ZZ Top fan to care about sorting them out, but was more concerned with the general schema issue.
As an aside, is it right that Unfinished Sympathy is both a song and a track? Shouldn't they be two different topics?
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The main thing disambiguators do is create multiple columns for a property on the topic page (so, looking at a musical track, the property "Appears on" expects a musical album, and additionally displays the disambiguators Artist, Release Date, and Release Type). They're also used to determine which fields can be imported using the list importer, and probably some other things that I can't remember right now.
AFAIK, the name, aliases, types, description, and image appear in the autocomplete. Adding disambiguators to it might be a good idea; I'll create a feature request for it.
Most tracks were imported from MusicBrainz, and were merged based on an analysis of their audio thumbprints, is my understanding.
Song vs. track: generally speaking, I believe so. But the Musical Track Documentation also mentions that "if this is the definitive or only recording of a song, it isn’t necessary to create a separate topic for the song", so I believe that some tracks and songs have the same topic.
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Aforementioned request is CLI-7869
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Why is the Brand field linked to a company? I find this confusing.
I would think that the guitar Type would follow the following: there's a specific guitar (Eddie Van Halen's original red/white guitar), guitar make/model (Ibanez JEM777), guitar brand (Ibanez or Ibanez JEM..not sure how far to go with these), then manufacturer (Hoshino Gakki makes Ibanez guitars).
I'm not an expert, so not sure where make/model/brand lines are drawn (let alone color like Ibanez JEM777LNG), but I know enough about guitars to know there's a difference between the brand like Ibanez and the company that owns the brand (who also owns Tama Drums).
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Looking at Little Earthquakes both on Wikipedia and on MusicBrainz, I see that different producers and engineers were used for different recording sessions. I would like to add producer and engineer properties to Musical Track; any objection?
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Hi.
I think it would be great to have some properties for "Music Festival".
I suggest a list of "Musical Artists" called "Line-Up". In most cases it's not important who played when on which stage/location, so an intermediate type "Festival Occurence" or sth. would be possible but not too useful. But a list of performers would be cool.
Some Festivals also have "Headliners" - The bands whose logos are mostly shown separately on flyers while the others are just listed. But I fear that this would be a too controversial property, because the definition is too vague. And it could in most vases be covered by filtering the most popular (however this is expressed) artists from the line-up. Also it would be necessary to make clear whether headliners are to be inclided or excluded in the "line-up". (I'd say they have to be included...)
Since artists and their albums can be tagged with genres, it would also be cool to have a "Main Genre(s)" property. But again, this could somehow be found out by querying the line-up.
Some other thoughts are to include some boolean properties, if the entry is a "free" festival such as the "Altamont Speedway Festival" or for example if a festival is organized for Charity (or maybe for which group or organization). But I'm not sure how often these properties would be used.
So much for my suggestions. They are pretty raw thoughts at the oment, so please discuss them with me.
Thanks for reading.
Thomas
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Hi, I created a list of the worlds best-selling musical artists on Sandbox
Do you think this list would be useful? Should I move it to www.freebase.com?
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Hey everybody,
I'm undertaking a base-building experiement with sanfranciscoscene.freebase.com. It's intended as a companion to my SFScene blog where I write about the San Francisco dance music scene, focusing on underground/techno events and the people who participate in them. What I want to do is set up a base of factual information, and then have links in from topics to reviews and other information that's on SFScene.blogspot.com. I originally got interested in writing the blog because there wasn't any real chronicle of what's going on in this scene, and putting info in Freebase is a way of capturing factual, historical information that may be of some interest later.
There are four main types of information I'm trying to capture, in roughly expanding order: DJs, DJ collectives, Events, and Event Locations. Some of the data modeling is a little tricky, because I want to capure, for example, locations that are businesses (like The Endup), and those that are "underground." I also want to have one event category, but have it be flexible enough to include recurring club events and one-offs.
I've started filling in some information just to see how well the models work, and so far I think it's pretty good, but I wanted to see if any of you all had further ideas/suggestions. In the new year I'll publicize it on the blog and see if I can get a data mob going to fill in more of the details (I know that many of the people I write about read the blog, and if I tell them there's a place where they can go enter information that will help publicize what they're doing, I'm sure they'll want to contribute). So have a look let me know what you think.
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Title says it all. A musician plays an instrument, s/he is not that instrument. Musical instrument could have a musical performance property that links to a person/group/role type but having "Musical performance role" as an included type of "Musical instrument" doesn't make sense. The people are performers, not the instrument.
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Pasting my response from the data-modeling maling list:
The performance role (which could perhaps have a better name) is used for connecting musicians to groups or recordings.
John Bohnam ---drums--> Led Zeppelin
Robert Plant ---lead vocals--> Led Zeppelin
The thing in the middle of the arrow is a performance role. Performance roles can be musical instruments, vocal ranges, ensemble roles like orchestra, chorus, or string quintet, conducting, etc.
Suggestions for a better name for that role are welcome.
Is that clearer?[end paste]
I also see, however, that part of your issue was driven by the use of Bass guitar as a performance role rather than Bassist. The primary reason for this is that MusicBrainz has an ontology of musical instruments that it uses to model group membership roles and recording contributions. If we are to harvest that information (which we don’t currently do) then keeping that correlation is necessary. Without a connection between instrument and person-who-plays-instrument, we won’t be able to map Bass guitar contributions to Bassist; it is easier just to keep the instruments themselves as the roles.
Many abums list contributions in terms of the person—guitarist, drummer, etc.—but just as many others list the instruments themselves—guitar,drums, etc. We should try to be consistent, but given that many instruments don’t have performer-role equivalents, and vocal ranges are referred to identically (I have never heard of a sopranoist), it seems easier to keep the role on the instrument.
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Pasting part of my response to your response:
I took "musical performance role" as an implication that the instrument is a musician is because "Musical instrument" doesn't make sense as the "Musical performance role" of "Musical group membership". For example, Jimbo Wallace is the bassist (general) or double bassist (specific) of the group Reverend Horton Heat. He is an instrumentalist who plays the double bass as part of the group. The current schema jumps over the role (profession/hobby) to link straight to the instrument but calls the instrument the role. That means that the role needs to be inferred from the instrument. As I'm drilling deeper into the reasoning for this modeling approach it's starting to make sense (e.g., specificity of double bass instrument is preferred over the generality of bassist role). However, it was not intuitive and 77 instances of "Bassist" as a musical performance role added by a handful of users and mw_template_bot is supporting evidence. Perhaps changing the name of "Musical performance role" would be all that is needed but the new name should imply an instrument/activity topic rather than a role/profession/hobby. Besides changing the name of "Musical performance role", it might be useful to add "Musician" as an incompatible type of whatever name "Musical performance role" is given. An "Instrumentalist" type that links the instrument to the profession might also be helpful for finding the professions currently linked as "Musical performance roles" and correcting the data given the current schema.
[end paste]
An "Instrumentalist" type might also be useful as a converter when importing data that list contributions in terms of the person.
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Would it be interesting to have a property that captures what the name of group was inspired by/based upon?
I know user Skud has a named type, but it seems quite interesting relationship for musical groups. It's a common question brought up in many an interview article and lists within entertainment sites. Small example: Bands named after places.
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I would rather just promote Kirrily’s type to the commons. Filtering the query for instances of Musical Group that are also Namesakes, and checking that their Name sources are also Locations, or instances of People that have the profession of Agrarian.
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Er… when I go looking for linky things, sometimes sentence fragments.
Filtering the query… is not too difficult. There.
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He is not a musical artist and did not make albums or record tracks :P Those should be move elsewhere (to their performers, ideally)
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This is a pervasive problem with composers. Classical albums are typically credited to their composers, not their performers, and so when we import music databases, we inherit that problem. A project to clean that up is in the works, but is probably some time off.
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Ah, that makes sense. I'd be willing to help with such a project if it was open to the public.
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Hello... I am trying to implement a system by which the lyrics for a song are downloaded from LyricsWiki via their API. It would help if the lyrics web link were not suppressed in the schema. That way, the assocation could be made from within Freebase. As it is, I must maintain a separate table mapping Freebase IDs (artists, songs) to the names given by LyricsWiki, and that's not fun!
So would it be possible to expose this field? I know that there is probably some contention in terms of which website be the "official" lyrics link, but if multiple links were allowed I would merely pick out the LyricsWiki link from that set...
Tx...
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The link on Track was hidden and unused because we weren’t sure it really belonged on the track.
On sandbox, I have removed it from Musical Track and recreated it on Composition instead. Two recordings of the same composition ought to have the same lyrics; one could make a very good case that if the lyrics are different, then one is talking about a different arrangement of the composition, at the least.
However, most lyrics Web sites do index by recording artist, so maybe this doesn’t work. What do you think?
As for external keys: that is something that Freebase is particularly good at. You can make a LyricsWiki namespace (e.g. /user/metaeducation/lyricswiki) and add keys to artists and compositions within that namespace. You can also make a URI template that automatically generates Web links from those keys; take a look at how the IMDb links for actors are constructed.
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Cris, please give us "Songs composed," I need it for John Cage. Thank you
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Please use the “Works Composed” property of the Composer type.
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... then why does John Cage have the "Song composer" type without anything on it??
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He has the Songwriter type, which as I said before is a shorthand for both Composer and Lyricist. Songwriter has no properties of its own.
He also has the Composer type with several “Works Composed” already entered. You can add to that list.
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Good morning, Cris, did you see my 3 wonderful philosophers on the front page today??
Sure, I can do that, but it is not nice to have empty spaces on the page. Look at Cage, please, what is the use of the "Songwriter" "Lyricist" boxes if we cannot put anything in them? It simply does not look good. Cage wrote songs...
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The Lyricist type has the property “Lyrics Written.”
Some types, like Songwriter, are only used to classify topics, and have no properties of their own. We generally try to avoid them, but Songwriter was added to the system early on.
As I said in our earlier discussion, the notion of which compositions are songs and which are not is too subjective to easily divide. Many people regard Cage as a cutting-edge composer, and would consider calling his compositions “songs” dismissive. Rather than provoke edit wars, it is simpler to regard all musical compositions equally in Freebase.
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Yes, I see your point, but it looks UGLY. Is there a way, then, of getting rid of the "Songwriter" from the page? If we cannot use it, it is better not to have it there at all. Why keep useless things? Please have a look at Cage, his page could look REALLY good if it was not for these 2 empty boxes.
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With over 3,000 songwriters in Freebase, I do not see the utility in removing it. And when someone is a songwriter, why not say so?
The UI could use some improvement for property-less types. That is not a good reason to remove a correct assertion, however.
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I meant remove the "Songwriter" from Cage's page not from Freebase
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Cris,
we need the "Concert Hall" Type and a list of concert halls, please. There are practically hundreds of them in the world
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Take a look at Micah’s draft Performance Venue type and Robert’s draft Performance venue as well. A concert hall is a kind of performance venue; what additional properties would it need that these Performance venue types don’t have?
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I am not thinking of any new properties, I only need the list at the moment
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Ok, thank you
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A composer writes MORE than songs, e.g. symphonies, tone poems, chamber music, etc. There is no way one can mix these with songs together. Can we, please, have a special property for this?
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This is a good point. I’ve renamed the “Songs composed” property to “Works composed”; it already expected the Composition type but was poorly named.
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Hey, this is fantastic! The truth is we need BOTH. There are composers who only write songs, for them is it good to have the "Songs composed" property.
Others write all sorts of things and for them we need the "Works composed."
One should have the choice between the two alternatives, use the one which is needed and let the other one obscured
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I disagree pretty strongly. Artistic judgments, particularly judgments of quality (when does a mere song rise to the level of composition?) are so very subjective as to invite edit wars. We have the Songwriter type with which a Composer can be co-typed if appropriate. But segregating the works—are Schubert’s Lieder songs, or compositions? And what about career songwriters like Billy Joel or Paul McCartney who start writing classical compositions late in life?
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I did not mean to separate the songs from the works "within" the same composer! I wanted to keep Billy Joel and Schubert separately!!
"Songs composed" = Billy
"Works composed" = Schubert
That's why we need both categories
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But Billy Joel has composed classical music. So has Paul McCartney. It doesn’t make sense to shoehorn their classical compositions into a song bucket just because most of their work has been songs.
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Alright, I see your point. So what do we have now?
Songwriter with Songs composed and
Composer with Works composed ?
If so, then everything is fine
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Currently, Songwriter has no properties of its own. It is a convenience type which includes Composer (with “Works composed”) and Lyricist (with “Lyrics written”), as well as Person (with all its properties).
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Why can't we have "Songwriter" with "Songs composed"? It makes sense and we need it
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Some composers are good arrangers, again, one cannot mix their arrangements with their original compositions, that is a differernt category...
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I wrestled with this for a while before deciding the other way. Sometimes it’s very clear, as Grainger’s several arrangements of his setting of “Country Gardens.” However, sometimes it’s much blurrier; the folk song “Country Gardens” existed for centuries before Grainger did his definitive scoring of it. Consider also Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” or the notion that the 1812 Overture is an arrangement of “La Marseillaise” and the Russian national anthem. The Arrangement type makes the nature of the composition clear, but the creative rôle of the arranger is hard to limit so precisely.
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That's true, so what do we do, for example when a composer takes a cantata and makes it into a PIANO CONCERTO?? I just had this problem with Xian Xinghai who wrote the Yellow River Cantata, which was transformed by a Chinese pianist into the Yellow River Piano Concerto! Who does take the credit for the new composition? I think the "arranger," but at the moment there is no way how we can credit HIM. You, as a pianist, should care about this...
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I just edited the Yellow River Piano Concerto. It is now credited to the arranger, but also marked as an arragnement of the Yellow River Cantata, which has its own composer.
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That's correct, thank you!
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Hi there, I'm working with someone who is trying to use Freebase as a semi-official database of their catalog. But one thing that seems to be missing is a place to put an album's catalog ID from the publisher (Kind of how books have "Book Edition"... with ISBN#s)
http://www.freebase.com/discuss/threads/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000058694f9?domain=/book
Is there any place to put this information on an album?
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An album can have multiple mixes which can be released multiple times in multiple countries. If your friend is this obsessive (-: s/he needs to go all the way down to the Release Event type, which is a particular release by a manufacturer in a region of a Musical Release of a Musical Album.
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Hi crism...
Oh my. I'd found Musical Release but didn't go that far into "Release Event"...that's definitely pretty deep to have to go to put the catalog #. :)
Part of the goal is to let obsessive fans get in there and do the work of completing the catalog. But I'll have to get creative with the queries if it's this far away from "album"...
So if I'm going to be doing that: why is Artist on both Musical Album and Musical Release? Should it be allowed to change? If the artist is not the same, then wouldn't it have to be considered a new album? (If I re-recorded Sgt. Peppers, it shouldn't be considered a release of that album, should it?)
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The Release Event is a compound value type; the label and catalog number show up as apparent properties of Musical Release. The exact structure is only an issue if using the API.
The artist can change on reissues. For example, there is a single Billy Joel-branded release of what is actually two albums by two bands that he was in before he started his solo career. Same exact recordings, but different packaging and crediting. You are right that a re-recording is a new album.
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I just noticed that "drum" is typed "Musical performance role" which seems to be a very confusing name. Shouldn't the type be "musical instrument"?
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Musical instrument includes Musical Performance Role, and drum is both. The reason for the co-typing is so that an artist in a band can have the roles of lead vocals and bass guitar, without having to have separate properties for each.
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For mw's consideration:
I've created a type in my personal domain called "Musician" which includes types "Person" and "Musical Artist." This type requires that its topics be individual persons, but we can also provide greater detail about their personal identity. Individuals can also be tied to the instruments they play (a property I've also added). Let me know what you think.-
This is interesting, Cedric, and it seems useful. The instrument played property is definitely more helpful here than on Musical Artist. What other properties did you have in mind?
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I changed my mind… “Instruments Played” and “Vocal Range” are now properties of Musical Artist, reciprocated by the Musical instrument and Musical vocal types. I have migrated the few instances you had in Musician to these types. Thanks for the very useful suggestion.
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It would be useful to have a type for music theory to identify definitions of music terminology, analytical methods, etc.
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and shouldn't there be a "type" "Music," so that subparts, such as the music theory topic, can be related to the domain?
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Thanks for the suggestion, Ron. Generally, a type is something that an instance can be, well, an instance of. So I think you’re onto something interesting here, but maybe not those specific types. What would it mean to be a Music? I think more specific types are in order; an analytical method would be a good example, as would things like the Musical scale and Musical chord which we already have.
I would suggest that you try prototyping types based on instances that seem to need them, to you, and see what properties they need. For example, on finding an analytical method, create a type, make the particular method an instance thereof, and see what properties are needed to flesh it out.
Thanks.
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Any thoughts about organizing and adding classical music-specific typing? Typically, the work or composition is used as a primary organizing principle rather than songs, tracks, albums etc. And song has a specific connotation in classical music versus its broader meaning in popular music. The songs listed for say, composer John Adams, are not songs in the technical sense.
Having said that, I don't know of a readily available data source that could be used to populate such a scheme. I suppose Wikipedia has lists of compositions by composer.-
Lots of thoughts about this! Traditionally, the primary artist of a classical work is the composer, with the performer secondary, but this was necessitated by space on the spine of an LP or CD, and the necessity of a store shelving an album in a single place. Later, databases and music players only had an “artist” field to fill with a singular value.
Freebase definitely enables a much richer ontology, but getting it right will take a bit of thought. Please share any of your thoughts here or on the developers mailing list. We will also be getting together with some folks from MusicBrainz and other interested parties to grovel over the concepts of music representation within the next month, and you should see some interesting developments on Freebase resulting from that.-
Need to also recognize that many classical works are really sets of works (movements), for example, a Concerto typically has three movements (fast, slow, fast). "Song" has always been problematic for almost anything except American popular/folk music.
I think it is necessary to think of multiple artists associated with a particular work, rather than a primary or secondary artist. The composer is the artist who produces the composition as a concept recorded on some medium, usually paper, the performer or performers realize that conception. Each performance is a different work, this is true in most music, but is the central point in classical music. So for example, to tie both comments together, think of a performance of "The Goldberg Variations" of J.S. Bach, versus the same work performed by Daniel Barenbohm. (very different) In some circumstances, we want to think of Bach as the primary and in others either Gould or Barenbohm.
There is no question that the current ontologies for music are seriously flawed.
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Al, check out the Composition type, which can include or be part of another composition. Does this help? We can also get more detailed, making a concerto, a symphony, a sonata, all separate types, including Composition and having movements as their parts. There is also an Arrangement for distinguishing significantly different takes on the same composition.
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This is very important to have "works" with subparts. I've spent some time editing Harry Partch compositions as a practice exercise and the works still show up on the homepage as "Songs composed" and the subparts list as independent works. In order for this to work accurately for this type of music, this categorization will definitely need to be fixed. It would also seem that some relationality would be useful, as well, since when doing this work I have to re-enter a lot of information for each piece, esp. the composer name, etc. Shouldn't the database be able to pull in this info for me?
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Good point, Ron. This is directly analogous to the problem with albums and tracks; tracks aren’t directly credited if they are on an album entirely by the same artist. There’s a tension between redundant data and confusing lacunæ that we need to resolve.
It would be nice to have a way to be able to say “this property instance gets its apparent value from this other property instance by these rules, unless someone gives a (different) specific value.” However, the best way to say that—or even if there’s a good way to say that—is something we’re still figuring out.
In the meantime, I would suggest not giving composer information for sub-compositions (movements, etc.); even if we don’t figure out how to do inherited property values, it will be straightforward to automagically add composer information to all sub-compositions.
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Should we be flagging multiple disc entires for merging?
Example: 2 topics currently exist as "Musical Album":
Grateful Dead / Steal Your Face (disc 1)
Grateful Dead / Steal Your Face (disc 2)
Now, in my mind, this is one album. It's initial release was 2 vinyl discs, but I think it should reside in one topic.
Opinions?-
Currently, the discs should be kept separate. This is confusing, it’s true, but given the currently model of only Musical Album and Musical Release , it’s the best option. However, we will be incorporating the next-generation MusicBrainz model of having “packages” that may contain other packages, e.g. a two-disc release that contains two discs, each of which has a track list. The details of implementing that model in Freebase are still being worked out, however.
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Chris, I saw the email about the proposed "Multipart Album", and to be honest, I think it's not the right approach at all. The whole "multipart" thing is actually a feature of a release, not of an album. Think about Springsteen's live album "1975-85". It was released as a 5-LP vinyl set, and also as a 3-CD set. Albums that were originally released as 2-LP sets were later released as single CDs. Or, to use an incredibly esoteric example, Joe Jackson's "I'm the Man" album was released as a single vinyl album, and also as a boxed set of 6 45rpm singles. Don't box yourself into the idea that the Music domain is only for creating CD discographies. That was MusicBrainz' mistake.
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Thanks for the feedback. Don’t forget about the Musical Release type, though. In your Springsteen example, the 5-LP set would be a Multipart Album with five parts. The 3-CD set would be a Musical Release, a release of the 5-LP album. We most likely need a multipart release to correspond with Multipart Album for cases like this. Similarly, I’m the Man would be a Musical Album with a multipart release consisting of 6 parts. (FWIW, MusicBrainz isn’t locked into CDs, either; it’s just that most of their data comes from people putting things into their computers, which means almost entirely CDs. Their next-generation schema is going to be much more flexible on this point, and I’m trying to anticipate it here.)
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OK—take a look at /music/package on sandbox and see what you think. It will take a little bit for me to populate some sample data, but the idea is that an album like The Wall would have a track list as well as packages (discs) that contain specific tracks. This can also model LP or cassette sides. The Joe Jackson album would have one release with 2 LP sides, and another release with 6 45s (or even 12 45 sides). This is much more analogous to the next-generation MusicBrainz approach as well.
For most single-disc CD albums, the packages could be implicit, or could be co-typed with the album, or made explicit separate topics, depending on how pedantic or thorough fans of the artist want to be.
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If you care about data in the music domain, please take a moment to look at it on sandbox .
The main change here is the new Composition type, which has Composer , Lyricist,/i>, and Recorded Versions properties. A Song is now just a kind of Composition (by way of an included type).
A composition can include another composition—so a symphony might include its movements, a rock opera can include its songs, an operatic cycle can include its operas. These different semantically-meaningful types can be added as the data is fleshed out.
This would affect a couple of other domains, too; a musical would be both a Play and a Composition , with the composer and lyricist using the Composition properties, and with its songs being compositions themselves included in the larger work; similarly for operas. (I do realize that there is a connotative difference between a librettist and a lyricist, but that is more a matter of era than anything else; which does Tommy have?)
Another new type is Arrangement , which is, like Song , itself a Composition , but which is also an arrangement of some other composition. This allows us to distinguish between covers of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Bob Dylan’s.
I am posting this same message to the developers’ mailing list; please reply with comments here.-
The changes described above have now been made on the main Freebase site. I couldn’t find any Freebase applications that used these properties, but please let us know if anything breaks.
One addition to these changes is that a Composition may be recorded as a Musical Album ( e.g. , a symphony that shows up as multiple tracks on the album).
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An album is sometimes released with additional tracks later; we consider that a release of the album rather than a new album. So here’s an interesting question: when a particular song is released as a single in different variants (that is, with different other songs), are those different albums, or are they different releases of the same album?
As a concrete example, Jethro Tull’s song “Said She Was a Dancer,” from Crest of a Knave , was released as a 7" single with “Dogs in the Midwinter” as the B side, as a 7" single with “The Waking Edge” as the B side, as a cassingle with both songs, and as a 12" single with “Dogs in the Midwinter,” “Down at the End of Your Road,” and “Too Many Too.” Do we create a single album with three alternate releases, or four separate albums with different track lists?-
I'd vote for alternate releases in cases like that, where they would all be considered "single" releases of "Said She Was a Dancer". In general, if a short-form release doesn't have its own title independent of the A-song being released, it goes in as one of the single releases of that song.
To facilitate this (and for other reasons), I would like to suggest that one of the attributes of the "Musical Release" object be Format, where the choices for format would be things like "12-inch vinyl, 33 1/3 rpm", "Compact Disc", "Cassette", "8-track tape", etc.
Other attributes that belong in Musical Release are Catalog Number and Mono/Stereo/Quad.
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Just a formatting design suggestion for the descriptions of the Domain/Types.
The bolded 'Properties' and on this page 'Types' should have more clear line spaces above than below.
Ex.
the Music domain. Some such have been inappropriately imported where they were not tagged correctly in MusicBrainz; please report these or un-type them as Musical Albums or their performers or authors as Musical Artists.
Types
Musical Artists are bands or individuals who perform or record Musical Albums or Musical Tracks. An artist may be a Musical Group Member and have a Musical Group Membership connecting them to another Musical Artist.
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Is there any way to link to multiple topics under one heading? Like, if you had a "Venues Played" subtopic could it link to 'Public Arenas,' 'National Parks,' and 'Artist Tours,' or does each one have to have its own subtopic?
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If by subtopics, you mean topics of different types, the answer is no. We looked at supporting that but it makes things pretty complicated. That said, you can type any topic with a type called 'Musical venue', so your instances of 'public arenas', 'national parks', etc... would simply have multiple types associated. For instance: Madison Square Garden might be a 'Sports Facility' but also a 'Musical Venue'. Make sense?
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Do you plan to add a property to song or track so people can say that a song plays on a certain radio stations?
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At least to me, this seems like ephemeral information if taken to the extreme. I could see that a particular radio station might have a 'heavy rotation' list that is continuously updated so that it shows the current songs playing.
I could also see that some radio programs could publish the playlists for a particular show. For instance, a college radio DJ could publish the list of songs she played in her weekly show.
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