How to Create a Pro-Am Music Science Community in Four Easy Steps

What is "Music Science"?

"Music science" is the scientific study of music – what it is, why it exists, how it evolved and what happens inside our brains when we perceive it and respond to it.

Why Do I Want to Create a "Pro-Am" Community?

"Pro-am" is short for "Professional-Amateur". In many fields of endeavour that are quality-driven, "professional" represents high quality and "amateur" represents low quality. If this is the case, then professionals have little interest in the activities of amateurs, and even amateurs are relatively uninterested in other amateurs. Pro-amateurisation is when amateurs gain the opportunity to make contributions on a par with those made by professionals. Often this happens as a result of new technologies. For example making music used to require a recording studio, now you can do quite a lot with a computer and a microphone.

The Internet has contributed to the pro-amateurisation of many activities; two well-known examples are open-source software and Wikipedia.

A recent development in Internet technology which encourages pro-amateurisation is the voter-driven news site, for example Digg and Reddit. (I base my claim that these sites are "pro-am" on the simple observation that some of the "front page content" of these sites is from very "amateur" sources, and some of it is quite definitely "professional" in origin.)

What makes pro-amateurisation happen seems to be a mixture of openness and quality control. If there is too much quality control, then the amateurs don't get a look-in, unless they are prepared to make extraordinary efforts to match all the quality criteria applied to professional efforts. If there is openness but no quality control, then the good stuff gets lost in an overwhelming quantity of junk content.

But get the mix right, and you have a "location" that is accessible to contributions from amateurs with limited resources, yet has enough quality control to attract an audience large enough to make it worthwhile for those amateurs to make the effort. And it's not just the amateurs who have to make an effort – one sign of successful "pro-amateurisation" (in fields requiring the presentation of written material) is that it encourages the "professionals" to go to the trouble of presenting their ideas accessibly, but without "talking down" to their audience.

Why Does Music Science Need to Go "Pro-Am"?

At this point I can put my cards on the table, and admit that my immediate interest in creating a pro-am music science community is so I can have a "place" where I can present my theories about music as described in my book What is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery. I consider myself a serious but frustrated "amateur". I may of course be deluded about the "serious" part of it, but the "frustrated" part comes from not having any way to present my ideas to the total audience of all people who might be interested in them.

One reason why music science makes a good pro-am candidate, perhaps more so than even other kinds of science, is that, on the one hand, science still has very little clue as to what music really is, and, on the other hand, most of the relevant known facts and theories are accessible to the "intelligent layman". So no one knows where the answer will come from (if there is one, and on this point I am scientifically optimistic that there is an answer), and it follows that almost anyone seriously interested in the subject has the chance to make the decisive breakthrough that solves the basic mystery, i.e. what music actually is.

Anyway, let's move on to the four easy steps.

Step One: Put an Underscore Between the Words "music" and "science"

On del.icio.us, there are many links tagged with music or science. However many of these links are not necessarily about "music science" as such; they just happen to be tagged with the tags music and science for some other reason.

So I decided to inaugurate a new tag "music_science".

I announced my decision to use the music_science tag on this page of my book website. I undertook to subscribe to this tag myself (in the inbox of Delicious user whatismusic). I hoped that other people interested in music science would take me up on this suggestion.

Unfortunately no one did.

Step Two: Create a Music Science Wiki

I created the wiki MusicScience at Wikia, where you can create your own Wikipedia-style Wikimedia for free. The idea here is to provide a common location where people could contribute content or links to content relating to music science.

Unfortunately no one did, and it's quite a bit of work building up a Wiki by yourself, so I didn't get very far.

Step Three: Start a Voter-Driven News Site

At CrispyNews they let you create your own news website, as long as the sub-domain is free, so I did, and you can read and contribute your music science news at musicsciencecrispynews.com.

(Still no contributions from anyone else yet.)

Step Four: Start a Sub-Reddit

I started a music science news site at CrispyNews, because you can just go ahead and create whatever site you want to. However, I think it would be nice if I could create a music science sub-reddit. One advantage of a sub-reddit is that Reddit is a more well-known site than CrispyNews. Another advantage is that because of their experience with the main Reddit and the more successful sub-reddits, the Reddit voting and scoring system is probably better developed than the corresponding CrispyNews systems.

If you support the idea of a music science sub-reddit, then go here and vote for it.

Step One Revisited: the "music_science" tag

In the process of writing this article, I realised that the critical issue with trying to start a community website is that I have to do all the initial work myself, and generate enough new content to make it worth visiting for anyone with an interest in the topic. Given that I have limited time and resources (just like everyone else), I need a "least effort" approach to generating maximum content.

The Wikia wiki was too much work, and even the CrispyNews site requires a certain effort for each "story".

I looked again at my music_science tag proposal. I realised that no one else was using it, and if music science links were being tagged, they were being tagged with combinations of tags such as music+science or music+perception. So to create a steady stream of "music science" stories, all I had to do was add this type of tag combination to my whatismusic inbox, and trawl through the links myself, tagging any that I judged to be proper "music science" links with the music_science tag.

Which is what I have done, and will continue to do on a regular basis. So far I have 173 links. (But even this scheme will only work if enough people get to hear of it.)

Improvements to Trawling

Finding links on Delicious is a good start, but there are other ways of finding new links, for example Google provides a notification service for new results for any search phrase you are interested in, and there are certain blogs that report on music science reasonably often. A comprehensive approach would involve subscribing to as many sources as possible via RSS and then "trawling" through them with the help of a good RSS reader.

Appendix: More Background On My Super-Stimulus Theory of Music

When I developed my super-stimulus theory of music, I thought to myself "This is exciting, I've developed a novel plausible scientific theory of music that explains many of the details of music, many people are interested in music science, it's a major mystery that has never been solved, even if my theory might be wrong or partly wrong it will still get a lot of attention because it claims to explain so many of the things about music which need explaining." And I also thought "It can't be hard to promote my theory – all I need to do is put it on the Internet."

Of course I was wrong. Was my theory laughed at, and viciously refuted? No, mostly it was just ignored. To find out why, I probably have to commission some sort of survey, but in lieu of that here are some random guesses on my part as to why my theory has failed to generate buzz even for what it claims to do:

• Many people don't realise that there is such a thing as "music science".
• Many people would consign music to that list of things that "science can't explain".
• Other people would think that somehow science has already "explained music", and they don't find this at all inconsistent with the observation that popular music continues to be composed composers (AKA "song-writers") who rely on an ad hoc mixture of intuition, experience and good luck.
• Most non-scientists will defer to the judgement of "real" scientists in deciding what is or isn't a good "scientific" theory of music.
• The "real" music scientists are all busy working on their own theories, or they just ignore the issue of theory and concentrate on researching very specific aspects of music perception.

The fact that science does not have a clue as to the true nature of music is the "elephant in the room", but it's not clear if everyone is deliberately ignoring the elephant, or whether a better analogy is that everyone is blind and they're all touching different parts of the elephant.

Suggestion Box

If you have a suggestion as to some better way to achieve a music science community online, send me an email. Or, write a web page about it, and tag it music_science on Delicious.