Seeking the ultimate music categorization scheme

[kotaja]

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In iTunes, genre and simple rating scheme falls sadly short when I want to search music based on my own mood, situational requirements or personal associations.

I drafted a scheme based on the "technical," psychological and personal associations of music. The scheme includes the following dimensions (details can be found at http://curioushuman.blogspot.com/ (http://curioushuman.blogspot.com/) ).

1) Technical Attributes
o Tempo
o Beat
o Mode
o Special Instruments
o Vocals
+ Language
+ Theme
2) Psychological Attributes
o Complexity
o Brightness
o Intensity
o Affect
o Contemplation
o Conformity
o Sensuality
3) Individual Associations
o Time
o Place
o Person
o Activity
o Music

These are in addition to the usual metadata (artist, album, year etc.)

With data like this, I could search for e.g. slow songs about lost love in Spanish sung by a woman or just uppity songs to get me going in the morning.

Does anyone know similar attempts in systematization, so that I could stand on shoulders of giants rather than build this from ground up? (MoodLogic is cool, but I think music has too personal qualities to be completely socially tagged.)

Also, does anyone know a simple way to bypass iTunes' clumsy interface for editing comment fields (or how to code one). I am thinking something like a dialog box with the above fields with dropdown lists, radio buttons and the like.

Let me know what you think!

[EDIT: Added categories Conformity and Sensuality to Psychological Attributes]

[splattabreakz]

blah

[kotaja]

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check out www.allmusic.com (http://www.allmusic.com) and look on the left you can search by mood, instrument, year etc

This is a great site for the purposes you mentioned. However, the search system is difficult to implement on personal music collections, and lacks the finesse I am seeking. Rather than listing all possible moods, I am trying to break the moods into their basic components to allow targeted searches.

Nevertheless, great resource!

[splattabreakz]

blah

[kotaja]

if you get something like that working well i'll be a paying customer gladly.

And here I was, planning on giving it away for free...

Seriously, I know something about psychology, but not enough about coding or music. To get started, I'd need a simple AppleScript to edit the comment field in iTunes. Having all the allowed values available in prepopulated form elements would make tagging much easier, and allow me to finetune the categorizing scheme.

Once the scheme is robust enough, maybe there's some room for an open-source project.