Classical Music and Metadata: Navigating Chaos

Vera Brozzoni When you manage millions of digital assets, as the BBC does, you need robust metadata practices to organize and discover them. Vera Brozzoni is a metadata manager at the BBC who focuses on classical music. She combines here academic background in music, philosophy, and the humanities with a rigorous metadata mind to help BBC systems - and ultimately viewers and listeners - discover and appreciate the music she loves so much. We talked about: her work as a metadata manager at the BBC and her distinctive background in classical music and philosophy and the humanities how the complex history of music complicates her work the role of taxonomy in her work the meaning behind the famous quote, "Metadata is a love letter to the future" how "music does whatever it wants" just as biological organisms don't always follow predictable rules the importance of not being present-bound and imposing current biases on prior generations of music her thoughts on the need for more practitioners with artistic cultural backgrounds to enter the field of metadata management the diverse variety of intellectual talent at the BBC how she sees her role as "bridging two completely different universes" her thoughts on how AI could benefit her metadata work her metadata outreach work into the music community how to measure the effectiveness of a metadata program her belief that the phantom of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal hovers over all cultural metadata work Vera's bio Vera Brozzoni was born in Italy where she studied Philosophy. She then moved to the UK where she studied History of Music and obtained a PhD in Composition at Newcastle University. She has worked in the music industry for many years, specialising in classical music metadata, devising innovative methods of schematising the history of music in all its complexities. Her aim is to evangelise metadata to classical music companies so that they can future-proof data coming from the past. Her other interests include AI, Machine Learning, cinema, literature. Connect with Vera online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MKWKw0x7uc Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 8. Adjacent to the engineering and information practices that build the semantic infrastructure we operate in, is the crucial field of metadata management. Vera Brozzoni agrees with the internet archivist Jason Scott that "metadata is a love letter to the future." In her work at the BBC, Vera combines her deep academic background in music and the humanities with her metadata expertise to help listeners and viewers discover and appreciate classical music. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number eight of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Vera Brozzoni. Vera is a metadata manager at the BBC and based in the company in the UK. Welcome, Vera. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work at BBC and ... Vera: Hello Larry. So, yeah, as you rightly introduced me, Larry, I'm a metadata manager. My particularity is that I'm a classical music specialist and I come from a staunchly humanities background and not a tech or library science background like most of my colleagues basically. Vera: The fact of being an anomaly in this field, I'm trying to use it for the good of culture, for the good of the arts, and trying to convince the classical music world of the importance of metadata, which is great fun as you can imagine. Larry: That's funny. I hadn't really thought about that side of it 'cause I've thought more like you, we met in London at a semantic event and you fit right in. It's like you're clearly not having any trouble integrating into the tech world and the media world, but that's interesting. Tell me more about getting your classical music colleagues on board with metadata. Vera: Well, the reason why I didn't feel like a fish out of water is because I have a degree in philosophy. Philosophy is not the abstract art of building universes that most people think. Philosophy is a very rigorous science in itself with a very specific jargon. And when I entered the world of metadata, I found out to my own surprise that a large part of that jargon was in common with philosophy. So I felt, "Oh, I actually understand this." And I didn't expect it, but I immediately felt, well, this is a way to put my analytical brain at use, not in philosophy, but in the real world, which is what philosophers would have liked anyway. Vera: So this was coupled with my passion and my knowledge about classical music, which is something that has accompanied me forever. I actually have a master's degree and a PhD in music. So yeah, I have my credentials. And I started to work for Universal Music some 10 years ago, and it was immediately clear that I had the right knowledge and the right expertise to make an imprint in the field of classical metadata. Vera: Classical music metadata must be said is an incredible mess because the history of music in itself is extremely complex. Musicians and composers have never thought in terms of metadata, like, "Oh, let's make this title really clear," or, "Let's make this data hierarchy very clear so that 300 years down the line, someone will be able to catalog my music very easily." No, this has never happened. Larry: So the whole classical music industry has conspired to make your job as hard as possible. Vera: Exactly, yes, and I enjoyed it. Larry: Nice. Well, tell me a little bit about that. So I sometimes think of some of my work as archeology, and what you just described is going back into classical, and classical music is probably, at least in terms of the western arts, it's as deep and established as anything. So there is a tradition there, like an intellectual and some kind of scholarly tradition. But metadata strategy wasn't part of it. So you're kind of putting the metadata on after the fact. Is that kind of how it works? Vera: Yeah, exactly. I liken it to Charles Darwin or Carlo Linneo (Linnaeus) or the old catalogers of living being, all the taxonomists of the past centuries. And again, I have used the word taxonomy, which is something that we currently use in metadata, but its root is actually in natural sciences. Vera: It's about trying to put a cloak of order onto something that is inherently chaotic. In the well-knowledge that order will never cover the 100% of what you're trying to do. There will always be something that is irreducible and un-catalog-able if you have this word in English. Larry: It's a word now. If it wasn't before, I'll take it. Vera: Yeah, exactly. I coined it. Larry: No, that's super interesting, that history and the interplay between disciplines, because I know enough about taxonomy, know that it arises out of Linnaeus' work in biology and that attempt, and it's sort of like, so it's more about, we think of taxonomy as not imposing order on things, but it's really more about not imposing, but ascribing order, ascribing characteristics to things so that we can organize them better. Is that sort of how you picture taxonomy in your work, is that- Vera: I believe there is a sense of hubris, there is a sense of we try to make things easier for ourselves to read. However, it's not just a matter of us modern people being arrogant and being cultural freaks, let's say. It's also a way to make sure that this wealth of knowledge, this wealth of culture and art will be readable in the future. I think you must be familiar with the famous quote, "Metadata is a love letter to the future," by Jason Scott I think. And I fully believe in that. I am quite an idealist in this sense. I do believe that my work in metadata, no matter how gray or boring it might look to someone who is not in the field, is actually extremely important. Vera: Now, the problem with classical music in particular is that it's a world that it's firmly steeped in the past and it's very difficult for them to think about the present, let alone the future. So I feel that very often my work is about bridging these three time dimensions, past, present, and future and try to make people understand, look, what I'm doing here is really, really important because obviously it's about cataloging, it's about archiving, it's about making sure that the people who will come will find a legacy of music that is discoverable. Larry: That notion of discoverability, that's sort of the whole point of, or one of the main points of metadata. I know there's a lot of other uses for it, but that notion. You mentioned a minute ago, you used the word chaotic I think to describe the heritage that you're working with. But if you go to the BBC website, it's anything but chaotic. It looks like, "Oh, this is very tidy and organized," and that's just the result of your work. I guess part of your work is too, because you love classical music and you want to portray it accurately. Does anything get lost in the tidying up of things? Vera: Well, of course, of course it does. But even when you say that the BBC website is all nice and neat, you don't see behind the scenes. Larry: Okay. Well, I haven't been invited in yet to look around. Vera: But yeah, in the field of music, yes, obviously there are things that don't follow. Just like in biological evolution, there are species of animals, there are creatures that don't follow any of the superimposed rules because evolution does whatever it wants. And music does whatever it wants as well, which is why when I was working at Apple Music a few years ago, I made a schema of a completely new type of hierarchy to schematize classical music. Obviously when we talk about a hierarchy, we immediately imagine a series of vertical layers, one under the other,