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The purpose of this paper is to present a new framework for representing music for information retrieval that emphasizes socio-cultural aspects of music.

Philosophical and theoretical concepts related to the nature of music, aboutness, musical works are explored as they inform how music is represented. Multidisciplinary perspectives on music information representation, classification, and retrieval provide insight into how information science can better accommodate music information within its disciplinary boundaries.

A new term, music information object (MIO), is presented and defined. Downie’s (2003) theoretical statements are reconceptualized into a theory of representational incompleteness and three meta-classes for music information object representation.

This new framework incorporates more dimensions of music representation than existing frameworks allow and can facilitate comparisons between classifications of MIO representations by music practitioners, scholars, and system developers.

The meta-classes form a much-needed theoretical framework for classifying and defining MIOs from any musical tradition for retrieval. This fills a gap in music information retrieval research, which lacks a theoretical framework that can accommodate musics from all traditions without attempting to organize them according to a western-centered understanding.

Social question and answer (social Q&A) sites have become a popular tool for obtaining music information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what users ask about, what experience the questions convey, and how users specify their questions.

A total of 3,897 music questions from the social Q&A site Yahoo! Answers were categorized according to their question type, user experience, and question specification.

The music questions were diverse with (dis)approval (42 percent), factual (21 percent), and advice (15 percent) questions as the most frequent types. Advice questions were the longest and roughly twice as long as (dis)approval and factual questions. The user experience associated with the questions was most often pragmatic (24 percent) or senso-emotional (12 percent). Pragmatic questions were typically about the user’s own performance of music, while senso-emotional questions were about finding music for listening. Notably, half of the questions did not convey information about the user experience but the absence of such information did not reduce the number of answers. In specifying the questions, the most frequent information was about the music context and the user context.

This study suggests a division of labor between social Q&A sites and search engines for music information retrieval. It should be noted that the study is restricted to one social Q&A site.

Social Q&A sites provide an opportunity for studying what information real users seek about music and what information they specify to retrieve it, thereby elucidating the role of social Q&A in music information seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how both producers and consumers of user-created music videos on YouTube communicate emotional information.

In total, 150 filmic documents containing fan-generated versions of U2’s “Song for Someone” were purposively collected. The author used discourse analysis to understand the types of videos created, the communication of emotional information from both the producers and the consumers, the social construction of emotion in the filmic documents, and elements of intertextuality that represented emotion.

Fans created videos containing cover versions, original versions of the song with new visual content, and tutorials about how to play the song. Producers of cover versions communicated emotional information, especially tenderness, through facial expression, their surroundings, and corresponding musical elements. Producers’ visual content expressed emotion through meaningful photographs and sad stories. Producers’ descriptions revealed emotion as well. Emotions were individually experienced and socially constructed. Consumers conveyed emotion through likes, dislikes, and expressive positive comments. Intertextuality communicated passion for U2 through tour references, paraphernalia displays, band photographs, imitating the band, and musical mashups.

Information science can work towards a new generation of multimedia information retrieval systems that incorporate emotion in order to help users discover documents in meaningful ways that move beyond keyword and bibliographic searches.

This is one of the earliest research papers in the area of emotional information retrieval (EmIR).

Nowadays, available music information is increasing rapidly from fast growing digital libraries and the Internet. How to effectively retrieve music data is a challenging task and content‐based retrieval of music is a relatively large area. Much work that aims at creating acoustical waveforms of music has been carried out. But to many people, the most important and useful feature of music is the melody. This paper focuses on the melody‐based retrieval of music, which can be regarded as a kind of content‐based retrieval of music but much closer to the actual nature of music. It can be divided into three parts for studying: the extraction of melodic attributes, the melody input methods and the matching methods.

The purpose of this paper is to report recent advances on a collaborative project that aims to develop content‐based methods for music information retrieval (MIR) as an alternative to standard text‐based modes of access to digital music libraries.

The paper describes current practices and ongoing research, and it discusses potential applications for future use.

Content‐based MIR approaches can extend and enhance the capabilities of traditional text‐based discovery and delivery systems and thus support the work of expert users such as musicians and musicologists. Examples of technologies developed in the context of the project include novel methods for automatic chord identification, motif finding, the visualization of musical structure, and retrieval of musical variations using harmonic and structural information.

The paper looks at new, non‐verbal modes of interaction with digital music archives based on musically substantive features such as chords, motifs, rhythms, etc. By building more sophisticated dimensions of interactivity into a discovery‐and‐delivery system, these tools could give the end‐user a more meaningful and rewarding experience. The tools potentially would be less costly and more scalable than textual annotation and markup, and their applicability extends beyond digital libraries to other music services.

This article discusses the advantages and challenges posed by audio‐based MIR and shows, via project‐specific examples, its relevance to supporting the needs of digital music library users.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate users' knowledge and use of social networking sites and folksonomies to discover if social tagging and folksonomies, within the area of independent music, aid in its information retrieval and discovery. The sites examined in this project are MySpace, Lastfm, Pandora and Allmusic. In addition, the ways in which independent record labels utilise social networking sites for promotion are investigated.

Three groups of participants were surveyed using questionnaires. These groups were music concert attendees, people who responded to online postings to social networking sites, and independent record companies. In addition interviews were held with digital music experts.

The results suggest that respondents use social networking sites for music discovery but are not generally aware of folksonomic approaches to music discovery. When users do use and contribute to the folksonomy, most respondents were found to tag for personal retrieval purposes rather than attempting to aid the retrieval purposes of the population of site users as a whole. The four record labels unanimously agreed that social networking sites are having a major impact on independent music discovery. Digital distribution has a major impact on independent record labels. It facilitates discovery but at the same time digital distribution creates new promotional dilemmas.

The project is small scale but the research area is a relatively novel one, and the results are interesting enough to share more generally in the hope that this project will stimulate further research activity in this area.

If an information retrieval system is going to be of value to the user then it must give meaning to the information which matches the meaning given to it by the user. The meaning given to music varies according to who is interpreting it – the author/composer, the performer, cataloguer or the listener – and this affects how music is organized and retrieved. This paper aims to examine the meaning of music, how meaning is communicated and suggests this may affect music retrieval.

Musicology is used to define music and examine its functions leading to a discussion of how music has been organised and described. Various ways of establishing the meaning of music are reviewed, focussing on established musical analysis techniques. It is suggested that traditional methods are of limited use with digitised popular music. A discussion of semiotics and a review of semiotic analysis in western art music leads to a discussion of semiotics of popular music and examines ideas of Middleton, Stefani and Tagg.

Agreeing that music exists when communication takes place, a discussion of selected communication models leads to the proposal of a revised version of Tagg's model, adjusting it to include listener feedback.

The outcome of the analysis is a revised version of Tagg's communication model, adapted to reflect user feedback. It is suggested that this revised communication model reflects the way in which meaning is given to music.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between musicians’ information seeking behaviour and the creative process in music, providing a framework for understanding the role of information needs satisfaction in musical creativity. A number of studies in information science literature have been carried out attempting to model cognitive, affective, behavioural and contextual factors associated with music information seeking behaviour. However, only few studies have addressed the relationship between information seeking behaviour and musical creative activities such as composition, performance and improvisation, listening and analysis.

The focus of this paper is to provide a framework for the study of information seeking behaviour for the purposes of satisfying musical creativity information needs, combining the theoretical basis of an established model of information behaviour developed by Wilson and the theoretical perspectives of a music creative thinking model proposed by Webster. The key features of the two models are synthesized in a unified model of information seeking behaviour for musical creativity and enriched with research findings identified in the literature of both musical information seeking and musical creativity.

The proposed conceptual framework offers an integrated interpretation of the combinations of information needs, information resources and environmental/personal barriers, which enable musical creativity. In the authors’ approach “musical creativity” is treated as a musician’s aim or ambition or drive for expression and is influenced by the way musicians seek information for that purpose. Therefore, musical creativity is an intentional behaviour which acts as motivator for information seeking and is affected by the available information and the musician’s information seeking profile. The current study include three important findings: first, the design and development of music library and information services for musical creativity; second, the development of music information literacy skills for creativity; and third, the information seeking behavioural perspective for universal musical creativity, and the implications for cultural musical heritage diffusion around the world.

An integrated information seeking behaviour model which includes musical creativity is developed through the synthesis of two already existing approaches, that of Wilson for information seeking behaviour and that of Webster for creative thinking in music. The present conceptual study presents a three stage pattern or process for modelling information seeking for musical creativity: the process initiates with the intention-motivation for creativity, then proceeds to information seeking behaviour and then concludes with the musical creativity outcomes. This is the first study that seeks to understand the relationships between creativity and information seeking behaviour.

This paper aims to discuss how collaborative classification works in online music information retrieval systems and its impacts on the construction, fixation and orientation of the social uses of popular music on the internet.

Using a comparative method, the paper examines the logic behind music classification in Recommender Systems by studying the case of Last.fm, one of the most popular web sites of this type on the web. Data collected about users' ritual classifications are compared with the classification used by the music industry, represented by the AllMusic web site.

The paper identifies the differences between the criteria used for the collaborative classification of popular music, which is defined by users, and the traditional standards of commercial classification, used by the cultural industries, and discusses why commercial and non‐commercial classification methods vary.

Collaborative ritual classification reveals a shift in the demand for cultural information that may affect the way in which this demand is organized, as well as the classification criteria for works on the digital music market.

Collective creation of a music classification in recommender systems represents a new model of cultural mediation that might change the way of building new uses, tastes and patterns of musical consumption in online environments.

The paper highlights the way in which the classification process might influence the behavior of the users of music information retrieval systems, and vice versa.

The purpose of this paper is to present the design and implementation of music courseware that features a music search system that uses impression keywords. The paper applies the courseware to Kansei (sensibility) development for elementary and junior high school students. The objectives of this courseware are to cultivate children's sensitivity to the mood of a music selection; an understanding of the effects of tonality on the mood of the music; and) an ability to appreciate and express music through activities such as searching, selecting, and listening while also utilizing information about musical impression. The courseware is also designed to support teachers who do not specialize in music education.

Music courseware is designed containing the following three components: a semantic associative search engine that enables the retrieval of media data related to impression keywords selected by users; interfaces and tools for music retrieval and learning, which support users as they study the mood of the music in an easy‐to‐understand format using basic music teaching scenarios; and basic music teaching scenarios that are designed and created by elementary school teachers to encourage student understandings of the tonality and mood of the music in a practical manner.

The results of several qualitative and quantitative experiments show that this courseware assists children in independently learning musical elements by feeling, understanding, and expressing music impressions using words from the courseware that are extracted automatically from musical elements, such as key, rhythm, tempo, pitch, melody, and harmony.

Additional applications in various elementary and junior high school settings are needed to address a variety of practical, real‐life teaching scenarios.

This courseware have the potential to support enrichment programs not only in ordinary schools but also in a wide range of non‐educational settings, such as welfare care, disability care, and cross‐cultural communication.

The main feature of this courseware is its multimedia database technology, which applies Kansei to music education, thereby enabling students to understand the mood and structure of music based on their own subjective impressions using an objective framework.