When you want to conduct useful (re)search that will bring you real data about the content of a piece of music, what you generally find is a set of metadata that inform you about the social profile of music listeners (like age, gender or location) or a scarcely readable screen capture related to the sounds present in a piece of music, along with complex mathematical equations.
However, most of the time, you are neither an engineer, nor a social media growth hacker. All these charts and symbols are very interesting for archivists or developers, yet not for you. The kind of data that you would appreciate finding, yet do not find are data that, when analyzed, can be used directly to compose and produce a title that will reveal you as a musician. Formally taught or not, you already know (a bit of) music theory and (want to) practice an instrument, yet your learning materials, at the moment, do not help you to express your individual views on music through useful patterns.
What could these useful patterns be? YMusic is offering tools to build relevant music queries: the ones that, when put together, may help you design a coherent research in the field of music. The target of such a research may be different idepending on what you want to achieve. For instance, composers may use YMusic to reveal musical patterns found in the work of other composers, and use these patterns as a source of inspiration to create new works.
Although YMusic can be helpful to analysts, composers, (multi-)instrumentalists, mixing engineers and the like, lyricists are also welcome. In YMusic, they can use the traditional search box to introduce keywords and get lists to find words that they love, as well as information about sound. However, the essence of our music search engine is to think in terms of musical data in order to share them with those who needs them the most in order to deliver a piece of music.
Using YMusic in its first version, think "RIF" or "rhythm, instrumentation and form". YMusic currently offers various parameters to search music in musical ways, mainly related to these three aspects of music. What to do with the data ? You must fix the target before running any search. Examples : "I want to know what is the average rhythmic density in cantatas composed by Bach","I would like to display the electronic instruments used in songs written by Maroon 5", etc.
Once your target is fixed, begin to browse the database and unfold the results for each search. Take notes and… search inside yourself to use both what you already know and these new data. Question yourself: "What is the purpose of music analysis after all and what can learners do with the result?" It is a real-world question asked by students in music. The best teachers answer like this: "Analyzing music through different lenses, from rhythm to instrumentation, help students and new composers to understand and apply the principles of music much better". In fact, by investigating a vast sum of musical data, they have a grasp on key concepts involved in music processing. By manipulating its elements and identifying the relationships between these elements, one can evaluate the content of a piece of music much better. Whether or not based on sheet music reading, it is a first step towards musical composition and production!