There is a lot of music being made and shared nowadays. Musicians can use the Internet to sell music, to get famous, or simply to showcase their art. They can be easily seen by their friends, their friends’ friends, and so on. At a first glance, this seems to be the general purpose of music-making, but there is music that is not necessarily made for an artistic reason. There is music sang at birthday parties, and lullabies to make babies sleep, and children’s songs that guide their games and plays. Some cultures have songs that are sang in funerals, in weddings, or during battles. This type of music, which is only meaningful within its context, is called ethnic music.
Many people eager to record and broadcast their music as a form of art, but ethnic music rarely reaches music stores. This is because its meaning is typically liked to local rituals, hence it simply makes little sense to record this type of music. As a consequence, ethnic music is rarely listened to outside of its original culture.
Listening to ethnic music usually involves a previous step of studying that culture: first, you find out about the vocal songs of some culture, then you search for it within the collection. There are many tools that help musicologists analyze ethnic music datasets. However, this approach does not help the non-musicologist public to you find out about other, similar music within that same collection, and they can easily miss some interesting content that is just a few steps (or clicks?) away.
This is what inspired the Macunaíma project. In this project, we devised an automatic recommendation system that could quickly find what type of songs you like within an ethnic music collection. This facilitated users to pleasantly listen to ethnic music using a web-radio interface, that is, without any previous study.
We tested our idea in a user study with the the Música das Cachoeiras collection. It is an ethnic music collection that was recorded in an sailing expedition upstream Rio Negro. It contains a diversity of ritualistic music, local artists, and some music groups that are clearly influenced by contemporary Western traditions. The source code for our demo is online on GitHub, and the complete study was recently published in this article:
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![[DOI]](https://timba.nics.unicamp.br/~tiagoft/wp-content/plugins/papercite/img/external.png)
T. F. Tavares and L. Collares, “Ethnic music exploration guided by personalized recommendations: system design and evaluation,” SN Applied Sciences, vol. 2, iss. 4, 2020.
[Bibtex] @Article{Tavares2020,
author = {Tiago Fernandes Tavares and Leandro Collares},
title = {Ethnic music exploration guided by personalized recommendations: system design and evaluation},
journal = {{SN} Applied Sciences},
year = {2020},
volume = {2},
number = {4},
month = {mar},
doi = {10.1007/s42452-020-2318-y},
publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media {LLC}},
}
The Macunaíma project is very special to me. It was first imagined around 2012-2013, when I was finishing my PhD. I still have its first draft, which uses Macunaíma – the name of the anti-hero protagonist of the Macunaíma book – as an acronym for MApas CUlturais NAvegando na Identidade Musical e Artística (Cultural Maps Navigating Through Musical and Artistic Identitities). In 2015, the project got a grant by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). It ultimately converged to a simpler web-radio interface (that is, not a map), and music is, in fact, the only form of culture that is being used. Perhaps this could point to interesting work in the future?