Mass Media Musical Meaning: Opportunities from the Collaborative Web

TitleMass Media Musical Meaning: Opportunities from the Collaborative Web
Publication TypeConference Proceedings
Year of Conference2015
AuthorsLiem, CCS
Conference Name11th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR)
Date Published06/2015
Conference LocationPlymouth, UK
Keywordscollaborative web resources, cultural context, data science, mass media, music information retrieval, musicology, narrative elements, text retrieval
Abstract

In the digital domain, music is usually studied from a positivist viewpoint, focusing on general ’objective’ music descriptors. In this work, we strive to put music in a more social and cultural context, looking into ways to unify data analysis methods with thoughts from the humanities on musical meaning and significance. More specifically, we investigate whether information in collaborative web resources on movie plot narratives and folksonomic song tags is capable of revealing common associations between these two. Reported initial findings suggest this is indeed the case, which opens opportunities for further work in this area, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and novel contextually oriented music information retrieval application scenarios.