Studying Music is Difficult and Important : Challenges of Music Knowledge Representation — or , Writing Poetry About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture

In my view, music is one of the most complex, difficult to study, and important to study of all cultural phenomena—in fact, among the most complex, difficult, and important of any phenomena whatsoever. Six features of music make it so: (1) Music is an art, so many musicians try to use its elements in interesting and original ways, not standardized and ordinary ways. (2) Music is a performing art, so we have both symbolic representations (both scores and transcriptions of performances) and performances. (3) Much music, especially Western, has synchronization requirements of a complexity equalled in no presentation of information for human consumption we are aware of. (4) Music is often combined with text, so its challenges are in most ways a superset of the problems of text. (5) Music involves many different instruments. This opens up the possibility of versions of a given work for other ensembles or at other levels of technical demands. (6) Music is extremely popular, so, for many works, numerous versions actually exist. For all these reasons, music is uniquely difficult to deal with, and uniquely valuable to study, especially by computer. To support the argument, we give examples in the form of conventional Western music notation that violate the supposed rules of music notation and/or bring up difficult issues of music representation.