ï~~Musical Instrument Database with Multimedia
Takashi SUZUKI *, Takako TANAKA* *, Kuniharu TSUBOI* * *
*Tokyo National College of Technology, Dept. of Computer Science
1220-2, Kunugida-machi, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 193 Japan
e-mail:
[email protected] jp
* *Tokyo National University of Arts
*** Chiba Polytechnic College
ABSTRACT
We are constructing a musical instrument database based on The Catalog of the Musical
Instrument Collection of The Koizumi Fumio Memorial Archives'[1] in order to be able to use in
musicological study. We designed the prototype system used NEXTSTEP environment. This
paper mainly explains about the function of the system including GUI (Graphical User Interface)
and query system. Also we designed HTML description of the catalog data on WWW. Further, by
mean of Relational Database and SQL server, possibilities of ad hoc reference by researchers or
high level query by ambiguous information are proposed.
1. Introduction
Database systems are extremely useful in compiling a wide variety of musical information.
The main purpose of this paper is to describe the construction of a music database for
ethnomusicological study. By means of the construction of a database, consisting of a variety of
data collected through fieldwork, it may be possible to process and analyze this mass of data and
discover previously unknown musical contexts. This approach is called 'database mining' and is a
method for gaining analytical knowledge from an accumulation of raw data. The goal is to provide
many indices, such as musical and cultural connections, transformation patterns, etc.
Recording data and picture image data are important in musical information with text data, so
multimedia database approach is adapted[2].
2. The Catalog of the Musical Instrument Collection
This booklet [1] is a catalog of the entire holdings of musical instruments in the Koizumi Fumio
Memorial Archives, Center for Music Studies, Faculty of Music, Tokyo National University of
Arts. This catalog itemizes a total of 643 musical instruments from world-wide sources. These
instruments were collected by the late Professor Koizumi Fumio who was a noted musicologist.
This collection is a unusuafly large and diverse in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and
Oceania. The Instruments in this catalog are grouped in five categories based on the
Hornbostel=Sachs classification, and each group is arranged more or less according to the external
appearance of the instruments. Fig. 1 shows an example of the descriptions.
3. Prototype system on NEXTSTEP
At this time, we constructed prototype system based on items of the Catalog. Classifying items
are same as the Catalog basically. These items are Classification of instruments, Name, Area,
Ethnic group, Playing Situation, Playing Method, How to hold, Material, Size, and Other data
ICMC Proceedings 1996
289
Suzuki et al.
