Musical Works as Information Retrieval Entities: Epistemological Perspectives

Musical works form a key entity for music information retrieval. Explicit linkage of relationships among entities is critical for document-based information retrieval. Works contain representations of recorded knowledge. Core bodies of work— canons—function to preserve and disseminate the parameters of a culture. A musical work is an intellectual sonic conception. Musical works take documentary form in a variety of instantiations. Epistemology for documentary analysis provides key perceptual information about the objects of knowledge organization. Works are carriers of knowledge, representing deliberately-constructed packages of both rational and empirical evidence of human knowledge. Smiraglia (2001) suggests the parameters of a theory of the work, incorporating the tools of epistemology to comprehend works by expressing theoretical parameters in the context of a taxonomic definition. A work is a signifying, concrete set of ideational conceptions that finds realization through semantic or symbolic expression. Semiotic analysis suggests a variety of cultural and social roles for works. Musical works, defined as entities for information retrieval, are seen to constitute sets of varying instantiations of abstract creations. Variability over time, demonstrated empirically, is an innate aspect of the set of all instantiations of a musical work, leading to complexity in the information retrieval domain.