Cross-cultural and Rhizome-like Music Information Retrieval and Classification System
To create a big-data, rhizome-like, self-learning auto-correction classification system for Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Taiwanese aboriginal music.
The interaction of music in various languages in Taiwan has caused a complicated hybrid of music that should be classified using the rhizome concept with big data rather than a hierarchical classification system.
Taiwan is a multicultural society that has developed a hybrid of music from different languages, including Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, and more than 10 aboriginal languages.
Some pop singers in Taiwan can sing in two languages. For example, May Day is a famous Taiwanese band that sings both Taiwanese and Mandarin songs. Worth noting, May Dayfs Taiwanese songs are different from traditional or popular Taiwanese music because their melody and lyrics are based on Mandarin pop. This hybrid of music offers an important opportunity to create a cross-cultural music information retrieval system that not only will involve technical music but also will relate to linguistics and anthropology.
The heterogeneity in Taiwan music provides an opportunity to rethink whether existing music taxonomy, such as R&B and jazz, presents the features of the songs. Benjamin Fields (2011) combined content-based information retrieval, graph networks, and social networks to explore how best to generate contextualized playlists for users. His study focused on personal music taxonomy rather than universal music taxonomy. Similar to Fieldsf research, this proposal intends to create a classification system which can contextualize music data rather than organize the data into fixed categories.
Music can be considered an invisible movie or an acoustic storybook that transmits complex emotions in its skills, parts, and frames. For example, traditional Taiwanese songs emphasize gguikau (ϋ, the style of speaking)h to strengthen the expression of meaning. If a Taiwanese song cannot provide singers with this feature or the singers do not express it, the song would be considered a gnewh or gstrangeh Taiwanese song. This feature is similar to Japanesefs Enka and to out-of-the-ordinary music analysis units, such as timbre, melody, harmony, and rhythm. In addition to the features in a songfs genre, language is an important category in music taxonomy. However, separating songs into language levels may hinder the study of cross-language commonalities in songs. Nicolas Scaringella et al. (2006) have mentioned the dilemma of classification:
...[T]his semantic confusion within a single taxonomy can lead to redundancies that may not be confusing for human users but that may hardly be solved by automatic systems. Furthermore, genre taxonomies may be dependent on cultural references. For example, a song by the French singer Charles Aznavour would be considered variety in France but would be filed as world music in the United Kingdom (2006:134).
In addition to vocals, most songs are accompanied by instruments which may play a more important role beyond making sound, especially for ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. For example, the sound of a nose flute in Taiwanfs aboriginal Paiwan can invoke emotions and memories for both the audience and the player, even if the player does not finish the song. This situation is similar to the poem by Bai Juyi in the Tang Dynasty, which features gemotion before melody ’¬Θ²ζLξ.h This relationship between timbre and instruments is strong and it should be classified carefully to prevent losing this information.
Taxonomy, and structured and document-oriented data
Traditional music classification is hierarchical, such as pop music in Mandarin or Taiwanese categories. For romantic pop music, an emotion tag is used to label the song (Figure 1). Figure 2 shows the simple and clear classification of music genres in Applefs iTunes store. However, this taxonomy provides only a simplified music world, so more inter-relational data is needed to help explore and retrieve music information. For example, Zhijung Z