1 Studying Music is Difficult and Important: Challenges of Music Knowledge Representation —or, Writing Poetry About Music is Like Dancing About Architecture

In my view, music is one of the most complex, difficult to study, and important to study of all cultural phenomena—in fact, among the most complex, difficult, and important of any phenomena whatsoever. The following features of music in general make it so. Some of this applies particularly to computer processing of music, but most of it applies in any situation. 1. Music is an art. Therefore the composer/artist can use its elements any way they like—for example, to confound music-IR systems, as the amusing essay “Composing to Subvert Content Retrieval Engines ” points out (Collins 2006). Obviously, few if any composers/artists have that goal in mind, but a great many—at least in some cultures, including ours — try to use its elements in original and interesting ways, not straightforward and conventional ways. This (among other things) makes content-based retrieval a great deal harder with music than with expository prose, the type of text that text-retrieval systems usually deal with and that music retrieval is usually compared to. Similarly, there is a story that Marc Chagall said, in response to criticism of his drawing by an art critic, “Of course I draw poorly. I like to draw poorly. ” That is, in his art, Chagall had no intention of using the element of drawing the way it was ordinarily used. The story may be apocryphal, but th