Indexing Music

CILIP Update, December 2008 contains an interesting article by Charlie Inskip who describes his research at City University into ways of describing music – not in musical terms such as form, key, tempo, but in terms of its spatiotemporal context or emotional associations.  In the article, he describes how music gets matched to different sequences in films and commercials, by either the music licensee, or by one of the film directorial or editing crew on the basis of a very subjective and often imprecise description of what is required. Sometimes, when a description of what is required is beyond words, a copy of the relevant scene will simply be supplied to the music owner, in a sort of lucky dip approach. Based on a number of interviews with people involved with selecting music for use with moving images, Charlie’s research is focused on ways of improving how the context of music can be described. He says that:

“…there is a need to extract cultural and musical meaning automatically from the content and context of large numbers of digital music files. I plan now to analyse the interviews further, spread them wider within the industry, – to include games designers, DJs and radio programmers – and evaluate existing systems. By the end of this project I hope to be in a position to develop a reflexive communications model and use my findings to recommend ways to build effective search services for industry purposes.”

Well, if that’s not a fascinating area of research in KO, I don’t know what is. It relates both to the Indexing Video thread in this blog, and to the Semantic Analysis Technology event ISKO UK held on 3 November 2008. From January 2009, Charlie will be writing a regular column on music retrieval in Update. And if Charlie’s research has whet your appetite, then you can read more in a paper he has just had published, together with co-authors Andy MacFarlane and Pauline Rafferty, in the Journal of Documentation, Vol. 64 No. 5, 2008 entitled: “Meaning, communication, music: towards a revised communication model.”

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Indexing Video

I detect that discussions around the pros and cons of various communication media lately are veering towards video as having the most immediate impact. I don’t doubt that assertion for a minute. But I do have reservations as to the ability of video to convey precise detail. The emotional and affective power of video is indisputable IMHO, but when it comes to detail, it has strict limitations (yes, you can challenge me on that). That’s why, I believe, the printed word (read also ‘displayed’ to embrace digital media) will take some surpassing when it comes to detail – and findability.

Digital text can be indexed fairly painlessly. But video can’t. That point is made well in David Tebbutt’s column in the current issue of IWR (Information World Review, October 2008). Videos – or slidecasts – are great as ‘experiences’, but if you want to refer back to a specific section, you can’t, because there is no way of indexing specific segments and jumping straight to them.

Am I alone in finding this a significant failing in 21st century IT/KO? Are there ways of doing this that I don’t know about? If anyone knows how to do this, please let us know.