MyStrands Tue Feb 06 03:56:53 CET 2007 Tue Feb 06 03:56:53 CET 2007Tue Feb 06 03:56:53 CET 2007 I wonder if anyone, for some strange reason, is reading these journal entries (no I am not emo or depressed, call it scientific curiosity lol). If not I spose they'll be a good reference for when I look back and try to figure out what the heck I was thinking heh. Either way, here is Part 2.

Sad, Sorrow, Grief, Bittersweet: Some of you may have noticed that many of my songs have redundant tags, such as both 'sad' and 'sorrow'. The reason is when I first came to MyStrands (as of writing this, it was yesterday) there were already some established, popular tags. I want others to benefit from my choices, in finding new music and such, so both the popular tag and my own personal tags were applied (why didn't I just go with 'sad'? Because I divide that into at least 3 categories: 'sorrow', 'grief', and 'bittersweet'. Good examples of each would be Mad World from Donnie Darko, the Immolation from Schindler's List, and Into the West from the credits of LotR: Return of the King, respectively). To define them quickly: 'sad' is the popular tag applied to all these songs for ease of searching, 'sorrow' is music carrying a sense of weeping, whereas 'grief' is more of a lament. 'Bittersweet' is music both joyous and sorrowful, often carrying a suggestion of regret.

Poetry: Another interesting tag I use sometimes is 'Poetry'. Now patently all my music is actually music: there is no spoken word or dialogue tracks in my library. So why poetry? This is a tag applied to songs such as Albatross by Judy Collins, or much of Simon and Gafunkel's works. These songs carry more meaning through the words than the music, and should be listened to with that in mind. Some almost approach what I would call 'ballad' form, and are among the highest rated tracks in my library.

]]>2007-02-05 19:47:03.050544 I started using MyStrands because I have long wanted to sort my music collection using keywords, and when browsing the net discovered the tag system. Now I just let my music play with the MyStrands plugin, and trying to keep up with tagging the growing playlist.

Some might be bewildered by the terms I use to sort my music: this journal entry is a means of explaining my system. My library of music covers a fairly wide range of genres, but the majority of it is soundtracks (movie, tv, and video game scores). Even within soundtracks there is a great variety of mood, emotion and instrument, and my system attempts to reflect that.

Instrumental, Orchestral, Vocal, Choral, Sung: All my music, in addition to labeling according to the emotion they evoke, is therefore divided into five primary categories: 'Instrumental', 'Orchestral', 'Vocal', 'Choral', and 'Sung'. Instrumental is a piece that focuses on one or two instruments for the majority of the piece. An Orchestral piece, on the other hand, is one that has many instruments (classic example being the Star Wars scores). If the scores involve voice parts, I divide them into either Vocal (single voice, non-english), Choral (multiple voices or choir, non-english), or Sung (any english singing: the majority of most peoples' music falls into this category). I would not need to do this except that my favorite forms of music fall into those categories, especially Vocal and Choral, and thus I have many songs having elements that I wish to distinguish between.

On a side note, if anyone can think up a better category name than just 'sung' for normal songs, I'm looking for a better word for it (and no, just using 'song' is not an option for me heh)

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