Discussions on Music modelling

Stephen, this looks pretty interesting, and is very close to what I've been working on. I was going to re-work my model today based on some ideas I had over the weekend, would you be interested in adding me as an admin on livemusic and we can collaborate on this type?

We're also having an internal meeting tomorrow to discuss live music modeling, based on the use cases we talked about on Saturday, so I will keep you posted on how that goes, and will use your type as a potential model as well if we decide to pursue separate development paths. 

Meeting has been pushed off to Thursday, so I'll let you know what comes out of that (and it seems that multiple people, both internally and externally, are working on this particular problem).

I've got something I've been cooking up in my personal domain that I hope to have done today, I'll give you and other folks a pointer to it when it's done and we can take things from there.

Okay, here's what I just sent to the guys here:

After several attempts that led to me bashing my head against my monitor, I think I've finally got at least a skeleton structure that fulfills both the information display requirements and our ability create some rich interlinking.

There are three types:

Concert Tour - http://www.freebase.com/view/user/philg/default_domain/concert_tour
This is the bucket type, if you will, that lets us enter specific information about the tour.

Concert Performances - http://www.freebase.com/view/user/philg/default_domain/concert_performance
Specific tour performances. In order to make this work we may have to enforce a naming convention like I've done with these sample shows, but we can also link into festivals or other concerts a band may have performed at during the tour (for example, the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert during the Use Your Illusion Tour). I've also added a property Band Members Performing to capture the specific line-up for that show.

Concert Set List - this is a CVT that currently has fields for Song (ECT Musical Composition) and Guest Artist.

What I like about this is that we can create a reciprocal link from Concert Tour to Musical Artist to generate a list of their tours, as well as another property on Musical Artist that reciprocates from Supporting Artist to distinguish between tours in which the artist was a headliner v. a supporting act.

Then, from Concert Performance we can create a reciprocal link back to the Musical Performance property in Performance Venue to generate a list of everyone who has performed there, the date, and the tour.

hey phil, i'll get you some more detailed suggestions tonight, but the main limitations i'm seeing now are

1) robert's performance venue doesn't have any of the actual location information

2) i think the concert performance type seems too geared around the headliners and tours...perhaps a result of concentrating on the dead.  i would prefer seeing it geared towards the concert being an aggregate of individual bands performing and a tour being an aggregate of those concerts. that would fit more naturally with the bulk of shows happening outside of tours. i think the headliner information could be cleanly denormalized into the tour type. 

 tour -- concert -- concert performance

tonight i'll give a shot at modifying the live music schema to show what i'm talking about. I'll also get some existing examples in there to give you a better idea of the issues i'm trying to address.

We can merge the two topics but name the resulting topic "Conductor".  Would that help?

 The problem is that at the moment some people have "Conducting" as their profession and others have "Conductor" and it's even more confusing!

I agree that this is information that it is good to model.

First, is the current model insufficient? For example, I’ve added Gustav Mahler as the conductor of the VPO (on sandbox) using the membership and rôle of the musical group. (Or, for that matter, see also myself with respect to the Brown University Band.) This would be my preference; I do not believe Conductor really needs a type of its own.

Second, if we do indeed need a Conductor type, what should its properties be? I would favor “Ensembles conducted” over a property for orchestras; there are significant wind ensembles, choruses, and marching bands that should not be orphaned.

Also, how do we model guest conductors? Looking at the VPO, I learned that they haven’t had a regular conductor since 1933, but they have had notable guest conductors throughout that time. Do we simply state that Maazel conducted the VPO at some point? Or should we model the dates?

Finally, note that musical recordings have the rôles of the participants modeled, so conductors can easily be described on particular recordings. Something similar could be done for live performances; in fact, this is what the Opera domain does, which is where this type originated. We could model significant live performances and the rôles played by different people in them.

What do you think about all this?

Cris, in music, after the composer who is THE most important person of all, the  conductor comes next.He is a CONDUCTOR (like composer/singer/professor/etc. and NOT conducting, conducting is an activity. This is a big difference! You become a conductor yourself when conducting, and cannot define yourself as a member of some group, or conducting some people, and so on. There is a whole row of conductors out there starting with Felix Mendelssohn who would go up the wall if you would say that they are not conductors but conducting!! There is no difference between opera/jazzband/whatever conductors, they are ALL conductors so we do not need to take THAT into consideration, just develop one conductor type. We usually talk about "Opera conductors" because Opera and Ballet are such spectacular things with big audiences, major productions, etc., but practically there is no difference whatsoever between an opera conductor and other conductors.

Orchestra - Ensemble, call it as you wish, I personally think that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic Orchestra are ORCHESTRAS and not ensembles, but again, an ensemble is an orchestra no matter how big or small it is. This is not a question of size but what the thing IS!

Hence, we have now a conductor who conducts orchestras. He does that sometimes on a more permanent base and sometimes (as you say) as a guest conductor. I am no expert on modelling and cannot help you there but I strongly believe that we should not fill the database with trivia! So you can think now how to present this as a type. Put something on paper and please let me know before you put it in the computer. Let us discuss this by email, (Kirrily/Jeff/Dan and others have my address)...

[posted to the data-modeling mailing list]

When Jeff created the Opera domain, he created a Conductor type to represent the conductor of an operatic production.

When I created the Music domain, I treated conductor as a performance role within a group, no different than the third violinist.

Now we have a Conductor with only the Operas Conducted property, which makes it look weird when talking about orchestra conductors.  We also have a Performance Role that various people hold within Musical Groups.

We should reconcile this one way or the other.  Opinions about which way is preferable?  Please make your responses in that Music Modeling Interest Group thread so that there will be an easily visible record for future Freebase users.

Definitely in the classical orchestral world, the conductor is probably one of the most important roles, sometimes overshadowing that of the composer (Leopold Stokowski is a classic example of a conductor who would alter/rearrange/adapt scores to suit the performance and/or ensemble). Stan Kenton and Nelson Riddle in the Jazz/Vocal Pop music world, they are just as important as the artists they worked with. In opera, orchestras, & small ensembles, the role of the conductor is usually pretty much the same.

So I vote for some sort CVT that captures something of the time spent with, performances conducted, recordings made with an ensemble of any size/nature

Gordon, if I understand you correctly, you're proposing "Conductors" properties on Musical Group and Musical Track to link to the CVTs you're proposing?  Since only a minority (even though it would definitely be a sizable minority) of groups/recordings could have a value for this property, it seems like overkill.  I'd favor co-typing a Conductor type with Musical Artist to capture that information (assuming we determine that we need a Conductor type).

The question of performances conducted is another kettle of fish entirely; to my knowledge, we haven't attempted this (outside of opera, which only attempts to capture the conductor and singers) at all.

I think there are two properties appropriate here. One is a generalization of “Operas Conducted”: it should be called something like “Significant performances conducted.” This would capture the opera productions conducted (which is really what “Operas Conducted” is talking about) as well as other significant performances, like premières of symphonies and such. The other would be “Ensembles conducted,” and would point to the orchestras, jazz bands, choruses, etc., that the person had led. That would be a CVT with dates.

The outstanding question, to my mind then, is what is the expected type for “Ensembles conducted”?It would seem a bit weird to have a blank “Conductor” property waiting to be filled in on Nirvana, the Beatles, etc. Should we have an “Ensemble” or “Conducted ensemble” type with “Musical group” as an included type?