Music Historian
Persona
David
Goal
David is interested in understanding the social history of music, e.g. who were the musicians, who was the audience, how did a particular musical environment relate to the wider musical environment. He has a particular interest in understanding the environment around music which would not be classified as ‘elite’ music. He is also interested in people’s experience of listening to music.
Scenario
David will work for several years collecting information, e.g. about brass bands, and populating a database with this information, as a preparation for writing a book.
Competency questions
CQ1: What music was being played?
CQ2: Who was listening to the music?
CQ3: How did the instruments used change over time?
CQ4: What was source of money – e.g. for instruments?
CQ5: Where were the musicians coming from?
CQ6: Who were teaching the musicians?
CQ7: Where were the places (in which they played)?
CQ8: How were instruments sold?
CQ9: What was the sales pitch?
CQ10: How does the world of brass bands connect with that of elite music?
CQ11: What did people ‘make of’, how did they react to, e.g. music?
CQ12: Who was the author of a piece of music? e.g. can we identify it by its incipit?
CQ13: What was the country of origin of a piece of music?
CQ14: What is the cause of a change, e.g. increasing number of concerts over time?
Resources
David’s work could be helped by:
sonic visualization, e.g. to recognise ‘thumbprints’ to identify the composer of a piece of music;
search of document database using RDF annotations and query-time reasoning;
NLP, e.g. to suggest relevant keywords for annotation; including using some semantics, e.g. proposing an annotation which does not occur in the text.