ResearchBuzz

I get back after two weeks and have a huge mailbox full of site suggestions and an even fuller RSS feed reader. Where to start — where to start — oh, what the heck, let’s start with Mozart. Mozart’s works are now available in an online catalog at http://dme.mozarteum.at/mambo/index.php .

There’s not much to the front page except a couple of news bits and a terms of service that you must agree to in order to search the catalog. Once done, you’ll be taken to a German search form — look for the “english” link to find the English version. You can search through ten catalogs of work, searching by category, musical key, editor, or keyword.

A keyword search for Apollo found three results, one from theatre music and two from orchestral works. Results include both music and commentary; bear and mind that a lot of the information is in German. Looking at Apollo and Hyacinthos, I found two information links. One, an i icon, provided information on the music. The other icon, a musical note, provided what appeared to be background an commentary on the musical pieces (my German is pretty limited) and then the written out — handwritten — music. I must say that the music looks more appealing to me scribbled out in someone’s handwriting than printing.

If I had more background in music I would probably appreciate this more. If I remembered more of my high school German I’d probably appreciate it more as well.

Wondering what music Google Talk users are listening to? Me neither, frankly, but if I DO, I can find out at Google Music Trends at http://www.google.com/trends/music.

There are a whole series of popularity charts here, allowing you to break down popularity of music both by genre and country. Glancing at Heavy Metal in the US, I see that it’s topped by Ozzy Osbourne and dominated by the likes of Tool and Metallica. Moving out of the country, though, I see that Heavy Metal charts in the UK also have Ozzy but also offer up artists like Rob Zombie and… Creed?

Creed is heavy metal? I must have missed the memo. Anyway, the charts include artist name, song title, and the position on the trends chart over time (most of the ones I looked at were marked “new!”) Clicking on the artist name or title takes you to Google’s musical information offerings.

The first thing I wondered when I saw this is “How many people are contributing to the creation of these charts?” I know it’s Google Talk users, but how many? I still don’t know, but there’s an overview of the service at http://www.google.com/trends/music?where=help. That page also shows how you can participate in Google Music Trends when using Google Talk.

Interesting information. I just wish I knew how many people it covered.

I thought I’d covered this in ResearchBuzz, but apparently I hadn’t, so there’s no time like the present… Podbop, at http://podbop.org/, allows you to search for musical acts playing in your area, and get links to songs by those acts at the same time. The site says it lists over 2700 artists and over 4200 songs.

The front page asks you to specify a city and state. I chose Indianapolis IN. I got a list of bands playing in the area over the next few weeks, including Moe, Nickelback, and Adrian Belew. With each listing (they include time, date, venue, etc and a link to more details at Eventful) there are also links to songs and song samples from that band.

All of the songs I saw were MP3s; I don’t think anything else is indexed. The songs themselves came from everywhere; I saw things from Archive.org, from record label sites, from the artist’s personal site, and from some places I couldn’t identify at all.

You can get the search results as a podcast; look for the giant icon at the top of the results. You can also get the results as an M3U audio playlist. Nice!

There’s a list of artists and songs at http://podbop.org/artists/. Visitors are invited to check the list and add other artists if they’re not already on the site. A great idea, well-executed.