A proposal of conceptual model for Brazilian popular music
| Date | 15 February 2023 |
| Pages | 1088-1109 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2022-0155 |
| Published date | 15 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Marcos Fragomeni Padron,Fernando William Cruz,Juliana Rocha De Faria Silva,Richard P. Smiraglia |
A proposal of conceptual model
for Brazilian popular music
Marcos Fragomeni Padron
Brazilian Federal Senate, Brasilia, Brazil
Fernando William Cruz
School of Information Science, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil
Juliana Rocha De Faria Silva
Federal Institute of Education Science and Technology of Brasilia,
Bras
ılia, Brazil, and
Richard P. Smiraglia
Institute for Knowledge Organization and Structure, Inc., Lake Oswego, Oregon, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The term “Brazilian popular music”refers to a varied repertoire of musical styles with a strong
connection to local culture. The initiatives of representation of this domain of interest occur through
adaptations of generic models and strategies coming from contexts and musical styles that differ from the
essential characteristics of the national music. The purpose of this paper is to present a characterization of
Brazilian popular music as a conceptual model which supports the communication and analysis of this domain
and serves as a reference ontology for various applications in the field of Information Science and others.
Design/methodology/approach –To achieve the purpose, a mapping about Brazilian popular music was
done from a literature review and a data collection with expert users, based on domain analysis theory. From
this characterization, the conceptual model was built using an Ontology Engineering approach. To facilitate
understanding, the results were described using a more user-friendly notation.
Findings –The paper presents a conceptual model as a first semantic reference on Brazilian popular music
that serves (1) to better understand, communicateand analyze the domain of Brazilian popular musicand, (2) to
supply some semantic aspects not covered by the adaptations that have been proposed on the literature for
musical representation.
Originality/value –The paper adds a new perspective to the understanding of Brazilian popular music and
open opportunity to explore other repertoires about popular music.
Keywords Brazilian popular music, Conceptual model, Music representation, Music ontology, Semantics,
OntoUML
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Brazilian popular music is one of the music styles most listened to by Brazilians due to its strong
connection with the local culture (Cruz, 2008). It is legitimated as an expression that earns a
character of tradition and promotes subjective records of the current social organization.
Due to its importance, there is a significant number of popular music resources scattered
in collections, repositories and digital libraries that, in general, are coordinated by several
Brazilian organizations and libraries. Despite the importance of popular music to the
local community, there are no bibliographic rules or standards to deal with the specificities of
this kind of music and that consider (i) its genesis, (ii) its essential characteristics and
(iii) descriptive elements of musical resources in written or audio formats. As a consequence,
JD
79,5
1088
The authors are grateful to the Brazilian musicians who were interviewed during this research.
The authors also extend their thanks to Bloco Alegria, a community in Portland, OR, USA, that loves the
music and culture of Brazil. The authors also thank Pat Riva for her feedback on the Conceptual Model
and the reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 18 July 2022
Revised 29 November 2022
Accepted 11 December 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 5, 2023
pp. 1088-1109
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2022-0155
the metadata for music information retrieval are occasionally incomplete, and integration
technologies in use cannot be efficient because they are adaptations of experiences with
textual information and therefore cannot accommodate different dimensions of Brazilian
musical information. The lack of policies for organization, access and preservation of
Brazilian music assets has impact on the development of collections and digital libraries,
which are led to improvise local solutions that often fail to meet the information needs of
different sort of users (Padron et al., 2020).
The experiment described in Silva et al. (2020), which involves searching using online
catalogs of Brazilian libraries, gives a very good illustration of that problem. In some cases,
the music was not found when it was inside a publication of musical scores or on a CD track.
In other cases, when found, there wasn’t any information about the arranger or the
performers. In addition, it was determined that the many catalog records for this music were
incomplete or incompatible among the different catalogs, hindering interoperability.
Many assume that the perceived problems are related to the lack of comprehension of the
architecture of this music, and therefore, defend the development of a formalization to
improve knowledge about Brazilian popular music among researchers and technicians of
different areas involved with this theme.
In this article, a proposal for a conceptual model is presented as a first reference ontology
that formalizes this kind of music in a broader sense, considering aspects of the cultural
context in which it is inserted, its nature, its conception, execution and recording, in order to
support the communication and analysis of the domain of Brazilian popular music.
To build this model, instead of starting from the literature on popular music in general, a
study of the literature on Brazilian popular music associated with a survey of Brazilian
musicians was carried out. This is the reason why this article refers to Brazilian popular
music and not popular music as a whole. However, as will be seen in section 4, much of the
conceptualization seems compatible with definitions of popular music in general, which
opens perspectives for future research.
2. Brazilian music characteristics
In international music classification systems, Brazilian music generally appears as a single
and indivisible musical style. However, the term “Brazilian popular music”refers to a vast
repertoire of musical styles, and there are research reports dated from the early 20th century
devoted to the identification of the essential characteristics for the definition of this repertoire.
In fact, defining exactly what the term Brazilianpopular music means is not an easy task
and manyinitiatives have been registeredin literature in an attemptto characterize this musical
style. Among the various possibilities identified, the one that best fit the purposes of this
research was from the perspective of Nationalism –a concept that unites local culture to the
music produced by the community, reflecting societal experiences (Bolhman, 2003). The first
phase of Nationalismin Brazilian music addressesclassical music, beginningin the Semana de
Arte Moderna(a coordinated arts festivalthat inauguratedModernism in Brazil in 1922)[1] and
gaining strength with the modernists who followed M
ario de Andrade. A second phase was
provoked by the Bossa Nova movement and intensified by the Tropicalistas in the popular
music sphere (Ulh^
oa, 1997). In this context, Brazilian music is identified as everyday music,
linkedto tradition, that plays in barsand that circulates in the media.Some musical styles stand
out in this phase: samba,choro,MPB,regionalmusic–nordestina,mineira,ga
ucha –Bossa
Nova,Tropic
alia,Rock Brasileiro,Vanguarda Paulista and nova MPB.
In order to support the boundaries identified in the literature and collect the essential
characteristics that permeate this repertoire, a survey of Brazilian musicians was established.
The method was based on the domain analysis theory (Hjørland, 2017;Smiraglia, 2015).
Interviews were conducted with 22 Brazilian musicians who work with these musical styles
Conceptual
model about
Brazilian music
1089
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