On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Paul C. Bryan <em...@pbryan.net> wrote:
> Attached is the IRC chat log from this morning's (PST) chat. Thanks to > everyone who participated. > > Paul > Thanks. :) I've read through the transcript, in preparation for this evening's meeting. There's a few things I'd like to comment on - more free form here, rather than perhaps flood them in during the meeting itself. :) Maybe that'll help save some time at 8pm EST. ---------------------------------------- "Do we want to track non-recorded works? ... <pbryan> Are works meaningful in MB if they're not associated with recordings? <ruaok> no. ... <ruaok> since they are tied to other things with ARs only..." I would say yes, as I'd mentioned on the style list. If a work is a composition (of some sort), then why must a work be recorded for it to be a valid work? That commingles performance data with composition data at the most basic level. The most extreme case is a "lost work". These are frequently quite meaningful in classical, yet by definition they cannot be recorded. Take a look at http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/CSG_Standard/Mozart , and search on "lost work". There's 73 matches on that phrase there. If someone is referencing the list of Mozart's works, are they really looking for "a list only of recorded works", or is it more likely that they're looking for "a list of all works (composed/etc via whatever compositional AR) this artist"? With regard to ruoak's point about unrecorded works and ARs, the AR link between a Recording and a Work is only one AR; we may know that lost work #X was composed by artist One between date Y and date Z, with libretto by artist Two written between date YY and date ZZ, using a translation of that libretto done by artist Three between date YYY and date ZZZ, and so on. Down the road, post-NGS, add Location entities, and those ARs get even more interesting. Regardless of the fact that no recording-work AR is possible, there still is a wealth of data, AR and otherwise, which can exist for an unrecorded (and unrecordable) track. ---------------------------------------- "Work A is part of a set, the next Work in the set is Work B" This, as I'd alluded to on the style list, is something I've worked on, off and on, for a long while. However, it isn't so simple as just having a potential for "movement 1, movement 2, movement 3, .. movement n". Add in alternate/replaced versions of movements, optional drop in movements (esp in opera), lost movements, movements which are also standalone works, etc, and it gets quite a bit more complex. Yes, "movement 1, movement 2, movement 3, .. movement n" would work for maybe 85% of classical (excluding opera, where these are issues tend to be present in far higher %s). But for the remainder, the ordering AR is doable... but interpreting those ARs, once they're set, could very easily be so confusing that the ARs are relatively meaningless. I tried to discuss some of this earlier on the list, but without example, I'd guess it was hard to follow. So I've put together some examples of various cases in classical. I don't think NGS has to be able to handle any or all of these, but I do think any work ordering AR should be able to, and I don't think we'll really have "solved" the dual issues of "containerizing" and ordering works until each of these can be handled in some sort of straightforward way. http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:BrianSchweitzer/sandbox/Works ------------------------------------------- Q: What is and isn't a Concept Album? A?: the work is often performed "in order" like Rush's 2112 I think that's close to the right idea, but perhaps a little too broad still. They Might Be Giants likes to occasionally do what they call a "Flood show". Ie, they play their entire first album, start to finish, in order. However, they've never made the claim that Flood was a concept album, nor would, I think, anyone who's heard it. ----------------------------------------------- "I'm inclined to limit works to musical numbers, not recitatives, not random dialogue." I agree with Jim - the recitative, the instrumental numbers around the arias, even the dialogue is important. Now, a potential pie-in-the-sky solution would be to, post-NGS, have some ability to actually store the librettos, and for non-numbered parts of an opera, be able to instead link directly to the applicable start and end text, rather than try to deal with an infinitude of variations entered as works. Note, though, I think that concern and problem, while valid, may be overstated. When dealing with the entirety of Mozart tracks in the db, 99.99% of recitatives used the same common split points. (And almost universally, those also are in accord with the split points used by the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe). I don't recall quite how many Mozart tracks there were, but it was at least in the tens of thousands. Out of all of those, for the entirety of the Mozart works list, there were at most only 10 or so recitatives which did not line up the start point on the same common split point as all the others. Brian
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