Re: [humanmarkup] food for thought

["Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>]

[Ignoring the scientific implications here...]

> Music is often considered as a "universal" language for
> emotion that can be understood by all people from
> different backgrounds.

It can be listened to by the majority of people, and the majority of them
can be moved by at least some kinds of music... but not all in necessarily
the same way. Although some pieces of music may be gloomier than others,
people would still write down a different set of emotions and feelings; try
it. Next time you're at a party, or some social gathering with music, ask
people what they really think of the music. Some people equate certain
pieces of music with eventys in their lives. I'm currently listening to
Proud Mary, by CCR, and I can connect that to a whole host of events: the
first time I heard it, the time I reslised that one of the tunes in The
Simpsons was a mild rip off of it, some people that I know who could be
characters in the song... So although music is certainly something that's
universally enjoyed, it cannot be universally interpreted.

I found this most annoying as a songwriter. Often, I would write a song
with a particular theme in mind. When I played it to other people (even
other band members), they'd re-interpret it in their own terms. Sometimes
they'd get close to the kind of feel, but sometimes they'd take something
totally different from it. That's how bands work: as one of the members of
Led Zeppeling said (I forget who, now), "our music comes from the spaces
between us". It was the same with The Beatles: Lennon and McCartney
together were more than the sum of their parts (although individually they
were legends too... but then, that's The Beatles for you).

As far as HumanMarkup is concerned, I wasn't aware that some work had been
done already on this. I must have missed it (can someone dig up a pointer
for me?). It would be interesting to get people to simply write down how a
particular set of songs make them feel, and annotate the scores with
HumanML. This could be a collaborative kind of thing.

Of course, there are some things you can never express, and no amount of
HumanML is going to "rectify" that, because it doesn't need to be
rectified. We discussed that a lot in Phase 0, and don't need to repeat it,
but it is a useful axiom to keep in mind. But if HumanML can make it easier
for songwriters to say, "er... well, this is kind of what I was getting
at", perhaps it will be a start.

Note that in the WAI, some members (well, one member) is playing with sound
icons to augment comprehension of documents. But of course, the sound clips
are very difficult to choose: not as easy as simply stringing a few words
together. Relationships between sound icons and documents is something that
we could investigate: the technological problem of how to embed the
information neatly into any generic XML content language. Perhaps we could
come up with some modules for doing so: kinda like XHTML modules, but for
attaching and describing sound objects. The object module + RDF metadata,
perhaps? Could be fun, but difficult to invoke the right response from
users... people like using pens to fill in boxes, not to create those
boxes. We have to create those boxes for them.

P.S. Now playing "Midnight At The Oasis", by Maria Muldaur" :-)

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .