Musical Metadata and Knowledge Management

IntroductIon Is music a form of knowledge? Probably not, even if music is undoubtedly an important part of our cultural heritage. Music is not a type of knowledge, at least in first approximation, because music has no consensual, shared meaning. One of the main reasons why music has no meaning, as opposed to text or even pictures, is that music is not referential: music is made of elements (notes, chords, sounds) which do not refer to any objects or concepts outside the musical world (Meyer, 1956). Being without meaning, music is not a type of knowledge. However, our heavily digitized society continuously produces and exploits an increasing amount of knowledge about music. This knowledge , also called metadata, has taken a growing importance in the music industry and deserves a special treatment in this encyclopedia because of the specificities of music. On one hand, music is ubiquitous and pervasive: there are about 10 million music titles produced by the major music labels in the Western world. Adding the music produced in the non-Western world probably doubles this figure. The music industry is one of the prevalent industries in the Western world today. On the other hand, music is elusive, in that it is difficult to define exactly what music is (for instance, distinguishing music from ambient sounds is not always trivial). To make all this music easily accessible to listeners, it is important to describe music in ways that machines can understand. Music knowledge management is precisely about this issue: (1) building meaningful descriptions of music that are easy to maintain, and (2) exploiting these descriptions to build efficient music access systems that help users find music in large music collections.