Music Metadata in a New Key: Metadata and Annotation for Music in a Digital World

Abstract

Not only are music recordings now primarily digital and able to be readily produced, edited, and mashed up, but entirely new metadata frameworks, encoding systems, and data models such as XML, FRBR, METS, and MPEG are being developed to cope with the needs of diverse user communities. Moreover, systematic annotations of the structure and details of musical pieces are increasingly common. This paper surveys the current state of knowledge with regard to annotation and metadata related to recorded music.

KEYWORDS:

• FRBR
• METS
• MPEG
• music
• semantic annotation
• XML

Notes

1. No. Beethoven never named his fifth piano concerto—the name came much later.

2. Many composers died after composing nine symphonies (Mahler, Schubert, Beethoven, Bruckner, Vaughan Williams, Dvorak)