Tagging DnB tracks
January 4th, 2007 by dizplayI’m still thinking about tags. The idea of reader Cygn in a previous comment to establish a taxonomy or even an ontology to maintain tags and by that tagging DnB tunes, is compelling to music as a whole, but has some limitations when it comes to differentiating DnB tracks. Take, for example, Phace’s “Reservoir” and Misanthrop’s “Viperfish”. Of course, these two are similar, and to a random non-Head they would both sound like an incarnation of hell, still for an insider it’s possible to quickly distinguish the two.
The problem therefore is to build an ontology of entities which allow for handling very fine-grained differences. I’m currently not convinced that it is possible to do that. After all, as Miles Davis (?) put it, “talking about music is like dancing to architecture”. My fear is that at least 50% of all Neurofunk tunes will end up being tagged identically.
My question therefore is: Could you provide convincing tags to distinguish Reservoir and Viperfish? I’m talking about musical properties, not artist or label info. (Feel free to choose others for convenience)
Update:
After some fruitful comments by Cygn, I came to think that the only way to provide a specification for describing tracks as similar as many Neurofunk tunes, is by extracting their intrinsic properties, however hard that may prove to be. The more I think of it, the more I feel we need a highly focused ontology which provides the following descriptions, maybe on top of more generally appliable properties like “Neurofunk, heavy, minimal, sub-bass-focused”:
- DnB-specific patterns, i.e. drum patterns (i.e. the “Phace shuffle” = shifting the initial kick of each 2nd measure by one 8th)
- Contained elements, i.e. “Apache break” or “foghorn”
- Arrangement elements, i.e. delayed drop
The problem is that an author would be required to have both very analytical skills and DnB background knowledge. I really doubt that there enough people to get this going.
Consequently, most DnB tracks will be put into a relatively small amount of different boxes. Maybe that’s not even too bad…
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I also find it difficult to find different tags for viperfish and reservoir. The problem is, you can hear the differences, but you don’t know how to express it in language. I think it’s easier if you are a producer, because you recognize certain samples or breaks.
But you have to ask yourself, why do you want to tag them differently if they are that similar? Even if you know how to express it in a very fine grained way, it’s very time consuming to tag them that way.
I would tag those tracks like this:
neurofunk, heavy, tool, aggressive
similar to: phace, misanthrop, noisia [+ list of tracks maybe]
mixes well with: [list of tracks]
for reservoir I would add the tags: foghorn (for the characteristic sound in the intro), blunt
I just googled and found this:
http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ontology/mo/
and http://groups.google.com/group/music-ontology-specification-group
It’s a specificiation for a music ontology. So far they haven’t covered genre, yet. But they have relations like “similar to”
Awesome, thanks!
Gonna check this out ;)
@cygn:
After reading a lot of the published information I feel the project is an interesting approach, but lacks two things:
1) Looks very beta to me, I’d like to have them sort things out, which is being done as of now
2) The specification is focused on describing relationships between entities, not their intrinsic properties. I therefore doubt that the spec is close to allowing for tagging tracks in a way similar to what you suggested.
To come back to your post: I think you’re right to ask why one wants to tag the two tracks differently, as they’re pretty similar. Still, doesn’t that hold true for the vast majority of DnB tracks?
I will post some additional stuff as an update to the post.
Propose this to rolldabeats, in order to menage the “recommendations” link in all the releases. Nowadays ther are some link as this
http://www.rolldabeats.com/release/subtitles/subtitles037
but the device is very poor.Convert this to a more articulated tag language could be a strong application (it means working a lot on the communicative aspects of the tags) also quicker language to understand and relate for.
http://www.rolldabeats.com and enter the forum, let’s propose this ! it could be a first terrain of application!
how about the small but usefull idea of marking dubplates with different tags, in that way producers could discover bad apples who shares without permission. :D
I prefer Watermarking ;)
http://www.neurocode.de/?p=89
ah right!
bla bla bla! stop talking bullshit you loosers! youre not the inventor of drum&bass you fuckin faggots
Didn’t say so, did I?
people who don’t believe in talking organically and scietifically about music or culture in general. Standard.