index ; 2. building a database of music reviews

1. overview and goals

  1. Overview
  2. Goals for the project
  3. Steps in chronological order

Overview

I have an obsession with popular music reviews. Since I listen to a lot of music and make a lot of music as well, it's interesting to see what critics are saying about other people's records. The existence of pop music criticism bothers me a bit, though, and I occasionally end up asking myself “deep questions” about the nature of pop music and popular music criticism.

Since there are professional pop music critics, does it follow that pop music should be judged as art? Are the variables and qualities of a pop record different and substantial enough to justify the existence of a specialized field of criticism? Do certain pop critics or pop music publications display a particular, consistent, and demonstrable set of aesthetics through the use of a specific language? Is everybody in pop music criticism speaking the same language? Are pop critics doing a good job? What does it mean to do a good job as a pop music critic? What is the difference between good and bad pop music criticism?

Since I like computers, I'm always trying to find new ways to use computers as a creative tool. My idea was that if I could get lots of pop music reviews in the same place, I could write some software that could find the words and phrases that the reviews have in common with each other. I could then use those results to try and make some "critic-friendly" music, perhaps coming a bit closer to answering some of the above questions in the process.

In this project, I will use content analysis techniques to find commonly-used words in a large database of popular music reviews, and then use collections of those words as creative guidelines for the writing, arrangement, and recording of a couple of pop songs.

My goals for this project are to:

  1. Draw attention to and investigate various components of pop music critical language.
    [I will do this by creating lists of words that reviewers use to describe the music that they like and don't like.]
  2. Demonstrate the use of music reviews as a basis for making compositional decisions.
    [I will create a couple of pop songs using the aforementioned word lists, forcing myself to make musical choices that I wouldn't make if left to my own devices, and encouraging myself to think about the music-making process in new ways.]

To accomplish these goals, I will perform the following steps:

    Phase one (data gathering):
  1. Relational database design (using MySQL, an SQL database package)
  2. Text parsing and statistics gathering (using the Perl scripting language)
  3. Web frontend design (using Perl CGIs)
  4. Manual word classification

    Phase two (music making):
  5. Pop songwriting (based on a set of guidelines defined in phase one)
  6. Playing electric and acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums, and singing
  7. Sound synthesis and sampling software (to produce electronic sounds)
  8. Multitrack recording using a digital audio workstation, various microphones, preamps, amplifiers, and effects

index - 2. building a database of music reviews