Your personal music search space.
Augment your understanding of music.
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YMUSIC SEARCH ENGINE
Since antiquity, human beings have been conscious of themselves and wanted to fix knowledge to ensure that future generations can also benefit from it. For its part, musical knowledge was first kept on stones: precursors to sheet music include antique cuneiform tablets and medieval manuscripts. Music printing appeared during the 15th century. Today, sheet music can be read and even played on a computer screen. As the ways to keep music changed, the ways to retrieve it changed through time. Besides libraries, musical knowledge can now be acquired on the internet. What is musical knowledge? How can music listeners increase their musical knowledge? What can a music search engine bring to the modern music listener? Know more about these topics by reading the following essays.
MUSIC, KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND SEARCH ENGINE TECHNOLOGY
To get new musical knowledge, try YMusic. YMusic is a prototype of a music search engine which relies on a new music theory; it is designed for all music listeners who are searching for music that is new for them and who are trying to develop their knowledge, be they casual listeners or not.
To have new musical knowledge, try YMusic. YMusic is a prototype of a music search engine which relies on a new music theory; it is designed for all music listeners who are searching for music that is new for them and who are trying to develop their knowledge, be they casual listeners or not.
WHAT CAN A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE BRING TO THE MODERN MUSIC LISTENER?
In the 21st century, numerous music listeners are used to searching for music independently. Before the internet era, specialized catalogs, guidebooks or encyclopedias in libraries, as well as the popular press in newsstands, were, in a manner of speaking, in charge of the instruction of all types of music listeners. Now that knowledge acquisition is, outside the context of education, a process that is more interactive, music listeners may rely on various online music services that contain millions of titles. What is missing? In terms of quantity, not so much. In terms of quality, these services offer great music in all genres.
But the individual tastes of music listeners are not really taken into account yet. Why? To explain that situation, it is necessary to use a culinary metaphor. Imagine that a chef has to supervise the preparation of meals that are made for a mess where 2 000 soldiers are eating each day. Another chef must coordinate the preparation of daily meals for 50 persons. It is evident that, in the first case, an acceptable level of quality is reached when the food is safely cooked: when its internal temperature is high enough to kill potential bacteria. In the second case, the chef, in a restaurant, can take time to taste all the food items and give suggestions to improve the preparation. Well, when a streaming service is distributing music to millions of users, without the help of a music search engine based on musical criteria, it is like the chef who must cook meals for a mess, while a music search engine like YMusic, plays the role of the chef who can take the time to taste all food for all the dishes. The combination of the two should be ideal.
It is to meet the high expectations of the modern music listener that YMusic is designed. A real exploratory project, YMusic is based on a new music theory. It is like a pathfinder for music listeners who always wanted to know more about music and music listening but did not have the opportunity to acquire a lot of musical knowledge in a formal way. The basic musical criteria of YMusic help them to think about music in a musical way, without being influenced by the opinion of their peers or by marketeers. Reading opinions is nice, but finding music that really fits the needs of each individual music listener is better. With a music search engine like YMusic, listeners can, search after search, become more aware of their own tastes, isolated from any value judgment. Is there still any kind of judgment related to music, in an era in which university students go to concerts whose stars are hip hop stars, who until recently, were performing in the street? Yes, in some environments and organizations, implicit cultural constraints remain, holding back knowledge acquisition. The YMusic search engine, based on musical criteria, overcomes cultural problems, offering a renewed focus on music itself.
A SEARCH ENGINE TO REDUCE THE UNCERTAINTY OF MUSIC QUERIES?
Music listeners can be unpredictable and depending on their mood, they will search for very different styles of music. But even in that case, it is not so easy to meet their expectations. In fact, what is for instance sad music? Everyone agrees on the fact that it is useful to regulate emotions, but what to listen in case of sadness? In case of a bereavment: "Requiem" by metal band Opeth or "Requiem, Agnus Dei", a piece of sacred music written by John Rutter? In case of a broken heart: "Where'd you go?" by hip hop formation Fort Minor or "How am I supposed to live without you?" by adult contemporary singer Michael Bolton? Examples could be multiplied, all showing that a song title or the name of a music genre are not enough to meet the immediate needs of music listeners, needs that are conditioned by a personal background as well as by their knowledge in the field of music. Just as comparable models of cars will not perform the same on a freeway, music titles that are classified in the same category will not produce identical effects in all music listeners. When it comes to emotions, comparison is often inappropriate. And after all, most music listeners are not unwell people who depend on music therapists. Music therapists’ work may be useful, especially in serious cases like injuries sustained by soldiers at war, yet a lot of ordinary people want to cope with the stress of life in an autonomous way and search for music alone. They want to learn the effects each piece of music has on their wellbeing.
Philosophers of Ancient Greece like Theophrastus and Aristoxenus agreed on the fact that the nature of music should not be defined without reference to its effects. Later, during the 18th century, Schiller said that, in art, the content of human emotions cannot be represented, but only their forms. Everything in fact is about finding the right form of music to recommend to the individual listener. As music is entirely substance and form and as it is not the representation of an external reality, its perception is highly subjective. That is why a music search engine must find the appropriate forms of music for each listener and find them according to what listeners know and express, not according to academic music genres. YMusic, which is a music search engine as of now available as a prototype, was designed to reach that target and to help music listeners to glean information from music and transform that information into personal knowledge, even surpassing the stage of simple music consumption.
To acquire new musical knowledge, try YMusic. YMusic is a prototype of a music search engine which relies on a new music theory. It is designed for all music listeners who are searching for music that is new to them and who are trying to develop their knowledge, be they casual listeners or not.
HOW CAN THE ESSENCE OF MUSIC BE DISCOVERED?
For centuries, music composers and philosophers have built up knowledge and disseminated it through media whose distribution was relatively slow. Nowadays, the internet allows the publication of a sum of information greater than the amount produced over some millennia. Also, the internet is helping to preserve ancient but also new knowledge. Ancient music, for instance, can be threatened, whether it belongs to a civilization which has disappeared or to an aboriginal culture. But new music too: an increasing number of musical pieces is published unceasingly, and not all of them will be kept by a music label. Digital preservation requires a lot of ingenuity from software engineers, whose algorithms must treat metadata (that are information about data like their provenance), and also from strategists, who conceive the business models to distribute the digital products. Furthermore, besides the question of the distribution and the conservation of music, there is a pressing need for algorithms that analyze the musical content rather than the cultural data related to music production. To address this lack, YMusic, a search engine which is currently under prototyping, is helping to find new music that presents similarities with what they are used to hearing, yet beyond any music genre, relying instead on musical criteria.
It is all about shaping individual listeners’ ideas. Besides composers and philosophers, all listeners have an intuitive idea of what is, for them, the essence of music. Most of the time, for naïve listeners, that idea will run through the filter of music genres. The YMusic search engine helps them to go further. That said, can music listeners trust a music search engine? The question is similar to that other question: can someone who makes a query via a search engine trust that search engine? Some will say that it depends on the search engine. Others will say that they cannot trust any search engine because their algorithms are like black boxes which do not reveal their secrets so easily. More simply, we will say that developing a search engine that gives accurate results takes time and that all music listeners who want to give us feedback (via the contact form present on the website) related to YMusic are invited to test it. YMusic is based on a new music theory. What does it mean? That the search engine is sustained by a real knowledge of music and that its analysis are based on a specific view of the essence of music. Isn’t it good news? In fact, numerous online music services provide a significant amount of music based on cultural criteria contained in music metadata like the words of the title or the name of the artist. For YMusic, such criteria are just entry points: receiving a query, YMusic analyzes music itself and, search after search, music listeners can understand music a bit more.
To have more musical knowledge, try YMusic. YMusic is a prototype of a music search engine which relies on a new music theory. It is designed for all music listeners who are searching for music that is new for them and who are trying to develop their knowledge, be they casual listeners or not.
WHAT DO GENERAL SEARCH ENGINES AND SOCIAL RECOMMENDATION BRING, IN TERMS OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE BUILDING?
Did general search engines, in themselves, change the way people think? Probably not, but, providing users with convenient access to a great range of information and ideas, they have greatly enhanced research and development in all disciplines, including music, and they have become a reservoir of knowledge. Making queries, people are moving from a document, that represents their last known position, to a new one. Exactly like the search engine robots that give them results to examine. However, people do not search as fast as robots and, to avoid getting lost in cyberspace, they must confine their search subject so that their own queries do not lead them to uninteresting places. The internet is in a sense very rapid, as it avoids long and exhausting journeys. However a real piece of research still requires a lot of time, especially when people do not really know what they are searching for. For instance, numerous music listeners would like to discover more new music they could really love. But who are these listeners, what is more, what is new, what is music and what is like? These questions, at first sight, can look naive and simple, yet they are not. In fact, social recommendation is currently hardly personalized. And, due to a lack of time, listeners’ queries may be general or imprecise. For example, some listeners may love the music of the 1960s. But which 1960s, actually? Do they want to listen to Arnold Layne or See Emily Play, two psychedelic rock pieces by Pink Floyd? Or do they prefer to hear traditional pop song like All alone I am by Brenda Lee? Pink Floyd and Brenda Lee do not represent 1960s’ music similarly, so it is not because two listeners are the same age that they will love identical artists or styles of music.
The idea of ‘new music’ is no easier to define. Of course, common sense tells to the masses that new music is music that is just published, music that is produced by electronic instruments or both. But are music listeners searching for common sense or for new sensations, emotions and thoughts? Beyond massive music distribution, a piece of Japanese world music that supports meditation, like Suiryo Bushi, can present a certain interest in terms of freshness and novelty. It is just an example. Along these same lines, a ‘like’ on social media does not say much about individuals’ music tastes. And sometimes, the game of ‘likes’ is inherently flawed: a study made by an American University has shown that sometimes, music listeners feel forced to feature music loved by their friends on their social media profiles: they ‘like’ one piece of music, they let the track run, but they deliberately refuse to listen to it! It means that in the best case, ‘likes’ can indicate latest trends and, in an indirect way, help to produce new music that is culturally similar to what most of people ‘like’ because they are invited to like it by marketers who have convinced their peers. ‘Likes’ are useful in terms of sales, but not so much in terms of knowledge building.
To know more about the nature of music, try YMusic. YMusic is a prototype of a music search engine which relies on a new music theory; it is designed for all music listeners who are searching for music that is new to them and who are trying to develop their knowledge, be they casual listeners or not.
WHY IS MUSIC SPECIAL AMONGST THE ARTS AND HOW CAN A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE HELP TO KNOW ITS SPECIFICITIES?
Since antiquity, a lot of philosophers, music composers and researchers have questioned themselves and their peers to discover the nature of music. Most of the time, philosophers gave explanations related to the essence of music, and musicians, who literally embody the strength of music, demonstrated its effects. Amongst philosophers, two tendencies talking about the essence of music have met with approval from the specialists and from the public. The first one is absolute music. For the supporters of this theory, the essence of music is self-referential, self-contained and autonomous: it means that music functions within its own sphere. That theory is supported by the fact that, in music, contrarily to what happens in painting for instance (at least until the 19th century), there never was a representation of any external reality, so its form is fundamentally always equal to its content. But can music really be absolute? The supporters of the idea that music is not absolute, but created to satisfy human needs, whatever they are, say that it is not and that music production is linked to human interests: for instance, to pay back a loan, Mozart wrote several ‘easy sonatas’ (including KV 545, Sonata Facile, I, Allegro, for piano). Thus these works were not written for themselves, but for economic reasons.
Actually, the question of the essence of music is complex: aspects like its effects on listeners and its form and content play a role in it. Concerning the effects, Pythagoras (5th century BCE) created the concept of isomorphic resonance, which says that it is impossible to judge music by the sense of hearing: music can only be appreciated by the mind. Aristoxenus (who lived during the 4th century BCE and was a pupil of Aristotle), preferred to approach music as an experience rather than as an object and, on the contrary, said that the perceptions of the ear play an important part in music appreciation. For him, the essence of music cannot be explained without any reference to its effects on music listeners.
During the Middle Ages, the contribution of Boethius (13th century) is notable. He talked about ‘musica instrumentalis’, literally ‘sounding music’, reconciling the mind and the senses. For him, music listeners have a ‘mind’s eye’, a sort of intermediary between knowledge drawn from the senses and knowledge that is the result of an intellectual reflection. That approach seems to be fair: musicians love to know how melodies are structured as much as they love to play them; and listeners can be curious too. The spirit or the mind of the listener is responding to physical sounds first and not directly to the structure of a piece of music.
Later, Adam Smith (an economist of the 18th century) called the effect that instrumental music has upon the human mind its expression, but he added that the effect of music is purely musical: it signifies and suggests nothing other than music itself, being a partisan of absolute music. The 19th century led to concepts like ‘pure music’ by Hanslick (a music critic), defining music as an absolute art of tone. Liszt, on the other hand, coined the expression ‘program music’ to name music having an evocative title that orients listeners’ attention toward a cultural object (cf for example ‘Years of Pilgrimage’, including S. 161, Années de Pèlerinage, II, Sonetto 123 del Petrarca).
During the 20th century, the battle raged between absolute music and program music: Stravinsky defended absolute music, saying that music has an intrinsic value which is not linked to the images that it evokes. Debussy (in particular with L 86, Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune) was a staunch defender of program music. Today, after a new rise of absolute music between 1945 and 1970, to forget how program music was linked to politics during World War II, the postmodernist era is welcoming hybrid approaches.
WHY IS MUSIC SPECIAL AMONGST THE ARTS AND HOW CAN A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE HELP TO KNOW ITS SPECIFICITIES?