A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE TO MATCH MUSIC AND MUSIC LISTENERS IN MORE EFFICIENT AND ENTERTAINING WAYS
One reason why the internet is revolutionary is its unseen integration of capabilities. In fact, it is both useful for information and knowledge dissemination and for global interaction between individuals as well as businesses or institutions. Coming from visions of a globally connected ensemble of computers that would let people run from one to another in order to access programs and data, the internet is the first global information infrastructure that is, to a large extent, accessible to as many people as possible. Expanding users’ horizons, the internet is a complex structure that presents several main aspects that include technology. In fact, to disseminate information online, it is necessary to acquire it. And also to analyze it, which is not so easy, because of the amount of data now available online, in all fields of knowledge. Computers being enjoyable, everyone on Earth having some passion wants to share it online.
The construction of the internet is still in progress and in that context, the case of online music services is interesting. In fact, the whole music industry is online, due to implementation efficiency. Music streaming services, for example, are complex platforms and they are the products of associations between the owners of the platforms themselves, but also music publishers and other rights management organizations. Thus these platforms are, in themselves, infrastructures. And the YMusic search engine, launched as a prototype, based on a new music theory, is a new long-term experiment: its development will evolve over the years to come. At the moment, streaming services provide millions of users with millions of songs, mainly relying on elements like listeners’ gender, age or location, or cultural metadata like songs titles, to respond to queries. YMusic helps these listeners to analyze music at the qualitative level, through different features, even when they do not know music. Yet it presents anit is also of interest to music researchers who want to work on a large corpus of music.
YMusic’s technicalities have their importance because they are necessary to create matches between music and music listeners, but its features are reinforced by the unifying vision behind them: the ideal scenario is that all individual music listeners can know more about the music they love and get more music they can potentially love. There are two poles in music: an objective one, linked to the nature of music (which is presented in the theory supporting YMusic), and a subjective one, related to music listeners’ experience in the field of music and, more generally, in their life. Tracks match when YMusic’s algorithm, analyzing musical content, meets listeners’ expectations. It is a delicate exercise, because computing is not a perfect science (yet?), however it is not magic: results correspond to rigorous musical rules applied through the search engine’s features. Yet the use of the search engine has nothing to do with traditional music education: nobody tells music listeners what they have to listen to or what they will like or not. Curiosity is not a bad thing: on the contrary, it is highly encouraged to get the most out of the music contained in the database.