A semantic tool for indexation and classification of music and sound objects in the Lusophone World: a theoretical foundation and practices

Abstract

In 2023, Lusophone countries and communities find their sound and music archives, as well as collections in a still-emergent state. A great portion of sound and music objects were primarily safeguarded by individual collectors, music authors, performers, and radio archives, and then reached memory institutions gradually. Since the 2000s, several institutions and individuals spread across the Lusophone world have been actively conducting hetero- geneous and decentralized efforts to preserve, physically and digitally, these types of objects, envisioning longer-term solutions for their safeguarding and dissemination. This, alongside the contemporary increased digitization of services within societies, originated many challenges, one of which is the classification and indexation of music and sound objects. In what concerns music and sound, most classification and indexation tools are of limited use to classify music and sound in Lusophone communities. Most are available primarily in English, contain colonial traces and are not exhaustive on the subject. Many were not validated by the Lusophone epistemic communities, music and sound specialists and linguists. On the other hand, the current versions of these tools in Portuguese language are also flawed, as they don’t encompass other variations of the language, presenting themselves as hermetic, they also rarely permit the inclusion of non-human produced sounds, and weren’t, in some cases, developed within Portuguese-speaking communities. Aside from this, music and sound are also perceived using other languages that throughout history became idiomatic to the field, and not subjugated to geographic borders. The lack of tools to address this situation undermines the findability, accessibility and representability of music and sound objects, limiting the dissemination of knowledge and the conception of more accurate digital representations of music and sound objects polysemic in their nature. This paper aims to provide a theoretical foundation and practices for the creation of a new tool that aims to combine the domains of digital humanities, web semantics, ethnomusicology, musicology and sound studies, to accommodate Portu- guese-speaking communities’ music and sound knowledge.