AllMusic’s Tone Intersections

In a pre­vious post about A Flat Hie­rarchy for Sub­jec­tive mp3 Tags, I desc­ri­bed the arduous and mar­gi­nally rewar­ding task of tag­ging my entire library with as many ‘tones’ tags as All­Mu­sic was able to pro­vide. With foobar2000 0.9 final now less than a week away, these tags may prove use­ful soon enough. But a few weeks ago, impa­tient and curious, I deci­ded to put them to another use:

By crea­ting a tones/tones tree struc­ture in foo­bar, I was able to count how often each ‘tone’ inter­sects with every other ‘tone.’ What you see above is the begin­ning of that data collec­tion, which I ulti­ma­tely plan­ned to analyze in…some way.

After Goo­gling around for ideas on tag clus­te­ring, I came across gCLUTO, a free piece of soft­ware that would, mira­cu­lously, do exactly what I nee­ded — namely, magi­cally figure out how best to clus­ter each tag with rela­ted tags. I figu­red four clus­ters would be a com­for­ta­ble num­ber, based on ear­lier rea­ding I had done on a two-axis theory of musi­cal emo­tion (intense/relaxed and positive/negative).

Unfor­tu­na­tely, my com­pu­ter simply couldn’t handle even cons­truc­ting and decons­truc­ting the foo­bar tree without free­zing up for about 45 minu­tes each time. Plus, collec­ting all this data would have meant hours and hours of work, for a goal whose bene­fits weren’t very clear to me at all, as well as a halt in incor­po­ra­ting new down­loads into my library. It was a pretty exci­ting cou­ple days while it las­ted though.