WHY A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE BASED ON A NEW MUSIC THEORY?
When users operate a computer system, it is because they want to achieve a target: to search for information or to listen to music, for instance. Computers are very functional. Search engines are not the “minds” of computers, which are just material objects with no consciousness. Their algorithms are instructions given by a human software engineer in order to find information that humans only transform into knowledge and wisdom. Furthermore, search engines give an access to various sources of information and they can be considered as a real progress in terms of storage and accessibility: during the pre-computer era, the content of an elaborated dictionary, for example, had to be written on millions of index cards.
Let us notice that knowledge acquisition is not always theoretical, for instance in the case of music: it involves perception and thus the use of the senses. The listener perceives sounds. Then comes reasoning. When listeners discover a new music and think about its structure, they enrich their mental models, those models being representations listeners have of the things with which they interact as well as the environment, others and themselves. In this environment, the computer is now a privileged object. Listening to music on a computer is now usual in a lot of countries: since the collapse of compact discs in favor of platforms, music listening, knowledge acquisition and computer systems are linked in special ways.
Each music platform is special and is the result of a software engineering work made in order to achieve a specific goal. For instance, streaming platforms want to provide important amounts of music to an extended number of listeners, using elementary cultural criteria like age, gender and location to make cursory recommendations. The YMusic search engine, currently a prototype, wants to help music listeners to make more specific searches based on musical criteria. Its algorithm is designed to increase the level of control music listeners can have over their music listening practice. In fact, the amount of music that is available online is in a sense an advantage: too much is always better than too little.
However, this abundance has side effects: music listeners are lost in a sea of music and they do not always have other points of reference than those given by the media, which often insist on novelty. Yet listeners may also want to understand the spirit of music itself, in a more subjective way, and take their own musical tastes into account. Listeners have the ability to understand music detached from song and sometimes, they even aspire to get the essence of music and what music means for them, as individuals. That is only natural, because music composers’ works are, in a sense, subjective, as they are created by individuals. However music compositions present a very objective side, depending on rules that are specific to music. These rules are numerous and presented from various angles in numerous theories of music. One of these theories, a new one, is inspiring the design of YMusic and it wants to uncover the true nature of music. Is such a theory useful to approach popular music or is it reserved for classical music? Actually, the theory can be applied to all styles of music, including popular styles so, yes, it is helpful.