How musicological research impacts the user experience at IDAGIO
Having worked for the past year in the Works Team, Adam talks to us about how the team has grown and developed into a close knit research community sharing a common goal…
The Works Team is a research community that is constantly growing our database of recordings…
Adam is a contemporary saxophonist living in Berlin and joined the Works Team at IDAGIO in September 2017. Since starting, the Works Team has doubled in size and continues to grow. In this blog, Adam describes the typical musicological problems the team encounters, how we resolve them and why we care so much about giving our subscribers the most accurate information on the music they choose to listen to.
What is special about working for the Works Team at IDAGIO?
Despite working remotely, we have created a very warm and welcoming community in the Works Team that is made up of highly intelligent, capable and music-loving people. Each individual actively takes part in the thriving Berlin music scene and cares deeply for the arts. The diversity of musical interest among the team is also very broad. In the team we have a group of Renaissance singers, a sound installation artist, radio presenters and I personally play saxophone with Techno, House and Drum and Bass DJs. We have all studied music at university level, which naturally brings many benefits to the team.
We all utilise our advanced research capabilities, striving towards one common goal — to create the world’s ultimate classical music collection.
This goal is special to all of us because we own the IDAGIO catalogue. We curate, research and identify problems with audio, historical or musicological aspects of any given work. It is a culmination of our passion for music, strong research skills and pride in our responsibility of maintaining the historical and cultural accuracy of the data we have on all of the music in our bespoke database.
What are the common musicological problems the Works Team solve?
Fitting a large variety of incoherent genres, epochs and styles into a single uniform database is no easy task. We also realise that our data model needs to evolve, transform expand on the go, as new issues inevitably will occur when new releases get added to the database.
We recently have developed a dedicated opera team that specialise in score reading and analysis directly from a given composer’s catalogue. This is due to multiple recordings of the same work having inconsistencies with the original score, meaning a system is needed that is flexible enough to handle it, but also robust enough to store the different versions.
The Works Team is not only about cataloging musical artefacts correctly and accurately. IDAGIO is a user based product and we are constantly looking at improving the way we work through the extensive and ever-expanding list of new releases. While process improvement is an ongoing evaluation, relevance and user experience is also at the foreground of what we do.
What is more important, quality of information or quantity of works released?
For me personally, I would say quality. However, from a commercial perspective our output needs to be high and the record labels want to see their recordings on our platform as quickly as possible. I think the balance has been struck very well at IDAGIO with regards to this issue. Our primary function in the team is to ensure that every entry is accurate and holds as much relevant information for the user as possible. We have the opportunity to research each musical artefact in a relaxed, stress-free environment, where accuracy is valued as highly as release goals.
How do you see the team developing within the company?
Our team consists of highly talented individuals with previous experience in many different fields including event management, sales & advertising, media production and audio engineering. With the combination of our daily use of the app, thriving team culture and personal ambition, we have the potential to develop not only our own career ambitions, but also the growth of the company.
Can you give an example of a typical problem you face when releasing a work?
The types of problems I personally encounter are typically to do with contemporary or twentieth century works. As we have core personal specialities among the team, (e.g. Opera, Renaissance, Baroque, linguistics) we are assigned individual tasks tailored to our areas of interest. Works by composers from the twentieth century onwards are catalogued by date or year of composition, which can on rare occasions be difficult to obtain from reliable sources. To tackle this, we are now investigating the possibility of an idea I put forward which is to reach out to contemporary composers who are still active in their field when we need further information about their work.
Among the team, many musicological issues arise from very disparate epochs. For example in the same day we might raise queries regarding how to format the title of a modern remix of sacred choral music, or how to apply consistent titling to instrumental madrigals from the Renaissance period.
The theme behind each query is typically geared towards a common goal: how to display all the information about a given work in a unified format that is not only consistent but also true to the historical procedures of cataloguing classical music.
What are the team’s current projects?
Having recently signed a new contract with Warner, we have been primarily focusing on the recordings ingested from that deal. The approach was a team-wide effort. The task meant more research due to the influx of new composers and new works from existing composers in our catalogue. For me personally, I enjoyed working on some of the famous names such as Sergei Rachmaninov, because it enabled me to develop research skills in a geographical and historical sphere that I was not previously accustomed to.
Now we are undertaking multiple projects, including updating content for the mood player, releasing high priority new excerpts from prominent composers and cleansing our database of duplicate work entries. We are always adding to our list of instruments which is expanding to cope with the way music has diversified over the past 500 years!
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Learn more about us on IDAGIO.com. If you are interested in becoming a part of this journey feel free to check out our open positions.
