We might as well call them dimensions....

I would think that tagging reduces the field in the same way that search does. It is about neighbourhoods of similarity. The multi dimensionality of the tags I care about create a space that I can navigate. So it is still successive approximation and quite random, whatever that means (Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has an online free book that attempts to answer what randomness is or isn't). I could not do as much Web work both at home and at work without delicious. It is not perfect, but I can find what I need. I usually over tag knowing that I can filter.

Inspiration for me is about matching the rational attributes that worked before to elicit emotion to try to make it happen again. It is about preference as it is wired in each individual. If I can find a set of attributes that describes my preferences then I have a generalization that works for the time being, at that moment. Usually this takes the form of a single artist - persons embody a set of attributes most easily. But then there is no need for tags, so where they become useful is when they can find connections between similar individuals or bands, like that web site that used to work in Canada and that found similar songs to the ones you liked. It is just a reduction of the statistical space to a neighbourhood.

Generally there are so many ways to slice and dice that it just becomes another way to navigate the world. The problem I guess is that the online world is so unconstrained in space that any constraints or guidance is welcome. It is an evolving thing.

As applied to music I think there are analogies, but the musical tradition helps reduce the dimensional space to something that may not require computers. Styles. I just want to try to push that boundary and do mash ups that may lead to emotional connections and surprise. Ultimately it is about creating beauty, which is the promise of happiness. 

Style fragmentation

But on another level, what people think of songs, or of behaviour, or of you is important. This is reputation. Reputation is a shorthand for memory, a way to deal with others without having to relearn everything about them through observation. The notion of friend or enemy is a higher level, based on reputation and experience, etc.. So we cannot throw any of these constructs out unless we get a total surveillance society, where we can dial-up a list actions to predict how someone may act. This is the dark side of everything is miscellaneous. Fuzzy understanding and memory is better than total recall. Time heals all wounds versus the perpetual reputation made on the Internet way back machine. So once again humanism and evolved mechanisms due to the limitations of biological memory have to be balanced against the new possibilities of cheap electronic memory and we are in clash mode. Estimates are that in 10 years, flash or something equivalent will be cheap enough that we would be able to store a video of our entire life on a fob. What does that do to the notion of reputation?

Musically, I should want to be able to search for stuff that is "like" my stuff and make a temporary category based entirely on constraints such as time range, key, or whatever attributes I care to define. I can then invent or belong to a style called "2000-2010 - key of Cm - male vocal - tempo 100-120 - 2-5 instruments - songs duration 2-4 minutes....

Is this good?

Miscellaneous styles

A few months ago I read Everything is Miscellaneous by a Harvard philosopher and it makes the argument that we can slice and dice things to fit any categories we find convenient at the moment. He is making the point that information processing has opened the door to breaking down the old Aristotelian hierarchy of categories that has been the basis of our understanding of the world for the past 2000 years. The argument is that our brains are no longer constrained to organize in categories and hierarchies of categories (because our memories are limited and we need to abstract and create bins that we call concepts) but that information processing has allowed us to keep knowledge organized at whatever level of granularity we would want without those (artificial) structural constructs. Thus everything is miscellaneous. So this kind of pleases me, since it is liberating. I can have my cake and eat it too musically. The categorization of a song as blues or ska or whatever is a side-effect of this cultural mode of thinking, and if we break it down, we can say that songs can be blues or ska but that it depends on when we listen to them and on who listens to them and that ultimately these categories are ways to sort records rather than truths. So I may want a song to belong to multiple bins and I can do that through hyperlinks. Ultimately I want to know what people think my songs would sound like and what tags they put to them, but I don't want to plan it.