Yves Raimond responded to my post aboutMusic/Audio Equipment Lists with Describing a recording session in RDF. I like it - looks useful.

Coincidentally I found my self doing something closely related yesterday. I wanted to better organize the various ’songs’ we’ve put together over the past few months. Our music room (formerly the cats’ dining room) doesn’t pick up the house wi-fi so I just made things up as I went along. Yves’ session data is more fine-grained than what I was after for this job, but I’m pretty sure with a bit of tweaking something consistent is possible.

Here’s a sample of what I came up with:

@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix : <http://purl.org/stuff/studio/> .

[ a :ProgressReport;
  dc:date "2008-03-18";
    :subject
  [ a :WorkInProgress;
      :shortName "gloriaok" ;
      dc:title "Gloria" ;
      :origin [ rdfs:label "Cover" ];
      :style "blues rock";
      :currentState "lots down";
      :nextAction "redo vocals";
      :nextAction "mix bass"
  ]
] .

As well as resolving the Music Ontology overlap, I’d also like to align this with my general-purpose Project Vocabulary so that not only will it keep things better organised (I had a few out-of-sync variations of the same tune) whenever I finally get around to building the GTD tools it’ll help me decide what to do next.

Shorter term, sticking the stuff in a store with a SPARQL endpoint would make a handy reference. Right away it seemed there were a couple of opportunities for automation - several of the

:nextAction

values were “archive”, a lot were “delete”. A simple script should be able to take care of those.

There’s an application ideas page on the n² Wiki, things that the Platform would be well suited to supporting. I just thought of another one, and can’t see any reason not to increase the LazyWeb angle by posting here too.

Ok, so there are lots of sound gearheads around. They love talking about their setup - whether just a guitar & amp or a fully-fledged recording studio or live rig. The application would provide an easy way of listing their kit and sharing those lists. On its own it wouldn’t be very interesting (e.g.), but if you allow for rich annotation and interlinking to things like equipment specs, manufacturers pages, bands and especially user comments and reviews, it could be really useful. Everyone’s always on the lookout for technical tips, new toys etc.

This came to mind tonight when I wanted to mic up a tambourine - what kind of mic to use? It took quite a bit of Googling and sifting through barely-related material, then diving into old-fashioned forum threads to find that condenser mics were best for the job, but in a pinch you could get away with a bog-standard dynamic SM57/SM58. My large-diaphragm condenser mic does sound good but is a hassle to set up and is really sensitive to background noise. But I found that simultaneously using a little cheapo condenser measuring mic (T.Bone MM-1) on one channel and my glorious Beta 57A on another gave very good results.

Many of the necessary vocabularies are already around: Music Ontology plus lots of Music Ontology plus lots of SKOS, Review vocab, FOAF, DC. I think it’d probably need a part-whole vocab (a Les Paul could have say Bare Knuckle pickups - nice tone!) plus something FRBR-esque for products (my particular glorious Beta 57A versus glorious Beta 57As in general).

A different bunch of terms would allow for hi-fi audiophile material, photographic/video equipment, custom cars/bikes…pretty much any activity that’s equipment-heavy and has a nerdy fan base (even computers).

See also: Harmony Central.