The Global Jukebox

I recently took on a very fun and interesting client. It’s Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Project. For those of you who don’t know Alan Lomax was musicologist who, beginning in the 1930’s went all around the world, from Texas to Siberia to all over Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and even Buffalo, NY, building up a comprehensive library of folk music from all different cultures. Then he thought about ways of comparing them scientifically to see if they reveal anything about the relationship between the characteristics of the music and characteristics of the culture. It turns out they do.

Along the way he invented a thing called Cantometrics to evaluate the music along an exhaustive list of parameters. The results are really quite revealing – as a musician I’d even say mind-blowing – and are encapsulated in his book Folk Song Style and Culture. Highly recommended reading. It’s very well written, and ultimately speaks directly to the question of why all human cultures make music, and why different kinds of cultures make the kinds of music we do.

Except now you don’t have to read the book, because we’re building a web site to bring it to life! The Lomax foundation has literally thousands of hours of field recordings, backed by an immense a meticulously catalogued database. We’re pulling it all together to present interactively, using different ways to visualize the relationships including maps, trees, lessons and journeys.

I must say it’s a refreshing change from corporate, agile-driven software work. As the front end developer and UX/UI designer, I have alot of freedom to shape the site. They’re academics, and while they’re very smart and care deeply about the work, they’re not software engineers or interaction designers, so they’re also very hands-off and trusting about things in my domain. They also tend to be more laid back, creative and open, so it feels alot like R&D work. Right now it’s a fixed-length contract, but they have enough ideas for years of work, so I hope they have enough money too, and the gig transitions into a long-term relationship.

This is also by far the oldest legacy codebase I’ve ever worked on. The original Cantometric data was originally encoded on punch cards in the 50’s thru the 70’s and entered into an IBM mainframe computer at Columbia University. Sometime in the 80’s someone ported it to C or maybe Pascal, and into a relational database on a PC or a spreadsheet on a Mac or something. Then apparently in the early 2000’s they ported it again, this time into a modern platform that was web-ready and could be queried using mySql. Then they spent an enormous amount of time digitizing all the music and cleaning up the data. That bit still isn’t quite done, and my first programming task had to do with rights and clearances.

Still, it’s interesting how computers were part of the vision from the beginning. In Folk Song Style and Culture there’s an appendix explaining the software at the time, mainly the data encoding and the statistical analysis work. I haven’t looked forward to reading an appendix so much since The Lord of the Rings!

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