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Welcome to the Sounding Catalogue of Music Descriptions!
SCAM ("Sounding Catalogue of Music Descriptions") is a project to collect the vocabulary people use to describe music, and the relationships of these terms. If you read Madison Bloom's review of Julia Holter's 2023 single Sun Girl in the Pitchfork magazine[1], the music is described with wordings like childlike, bagpipe, melting, birdsong, piccolo, drum machine, mellotron, bubbling, sing-song, nursery rhyme, surrealistic, lap steel guitar, whirring, looping vocals, sheer voice, key plinks, circular melody, craggy drums, screeching sax, placid vocals, baroque, chamber pop, psychedelia, dream, swirling, brassy and vibrant. Together, these depict a very finely shaded verbal description of the song. The idea behind SCAM is to collect such wordings to grasp their meaning in two ways:
- Explore for which musical pieces such a wording is used. An interesting way is to listen to the music people tag with it on sites like Last.fm. If you click on the tags listed in the Sun Girl example above, you'll see there are links to the respective Last.fm tag pages, where you can listen to the music people tagged with it (therefore the S in SCAM). Doing so, you get a feeling about what that tag can mean. (I usually use the word tag for what I used to call "wording" in the introductory text, since it's a nice and snappy term. In the Wikibase terminology however, which is the software behind this site, they are called "Items", which is why you find links like "New Item" on the left menu bar. But you can call them whatever you prefer, occasionally I also call them "musical phenomenons" or "musemes" or "descriptors")
- Explore what the tags have to do with each other. On the tag pages on this site, there are "associated with" links, leading to the pages of other musical phenomenons. Here an idea comes in that also applies to song-tag attributions made by reviewers like Madison Bloom: the subjectivity of these attributions is the strength. If you see that someone tagged Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with "sad" but feel differently, just add your associations (on Last.fm in this example)! That way, in sum a fine-grained picture of the piece is expressed by the tags; a picture that may tell something about the emotional complexity of the music. Likewise, feel free to add your own associations to the SCAM tag pages, even if they contradict an association another person added. When the goal is to make sense of a highly subjective thing like music, it's natural to capture this subjectiveness.
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