For starters, drop the idea of a single rigid taxonomy — there are too many ways through, even assuming that canonical representations are possible. So we’re probably looking at something at least personal, possibly community-based. Folksonomic tagging would be a start, but how to navigate in a neatly glanceable fashion?

I’m thinking of building a personalised acoustic surface, where patches of looped sound are snippets representing genres and subgenres, and which morph into one another ‘at the edges’ so you end up with a navigable 2- or 3-space which is a musical patchwork. ‘Drill down’ into any patch and explore the subgenres under it. Everyone (or their software) could generate their own personalised surface — which would keep things small enough to be navigable — from a CDDB-style online database of user-contributed, tagged patches. Easy to make, with a few rules and some code to allow individual people and their software to stitch them together seamlessly into their own personalised surface. And would appeal to long-tail passion: people who care about genres would be motivated to have them well-represented by nice patches…

So. Sometime soon, broadbandwidth and QoS sufficient to stream 16/44k1 audio reliably, longhaul. And at some point a bit later, maybe, OMD aggregators which will be able to provide access to most of everything that way.

On my mind at the moment is the question: how to navigate the whole of music space, in a glanceable fashion: minus clunky jogwheels and textual taxonomies. I’m thinking, as rules of the game, to allow only a 5.1 surroundfield and a remote useable one-handed, without any interactivity built into the remote itself — effectively a system which could be used in the dark, or without a screen visible. How to make such a thing that would, with a ‘reasonable’ amount of time/effort spent on interaction, get to the specific tracks anyone wanted, with the whole of world music as the source? It feels possible. More soon.

Have been playing with interfaces. Cluster now includes a daily calendar (see right) of what‘s on on the London music scene (that I’m interested in — big caveat!). This is generated by a perl script from PHPiCalendar RSS feed. At the moment this is from a single feed, but there is no reason this itself could not be generated from syndicated calendars (as and when this catches on).