Music Tropes site?

glennmagusharvey

Would anyone be interested in a site like TVT but for music tropes?

I came up with this idea a few days ago.  Something featuring articles such as "Alberti bass", "circle of fifths", "bridge", and "Mozartean trill"--i.e. tropes for all sorts of different styles of music.  There are of course going to be some "overlaps" where you get tropes typically used in one style appearing in other styles, and I'd really like to see that interconnectedness.

There are just a few music-(theory-)related articles on TVT right now, and I know I've contributed significantly to several of them.  TVT users, by and large, just aren't all that interested in music tropes, despite the efforts of the small minority of us music buffs.  Moreover, TVT seems to be having some issues with userbase instability these days.  So I was thinking it would be nice to move this effort to a sister site.

I'm also planning to make a few improvements over TVT in terms of how the site works:

• Neutral point of view (NPOV) policy.  The site shall be used to document things, such as musical features.  There should be no praise or dissing, except in (1) documenting broad trends of audience opinion and (2) in dedicated opinion sections.  (Audience reactions can be included in a separate section (such as a separate part of the page), though such a section should be more visible than the YMMV tab on a TVT page, as audience reactions are a big part of music--and media in general, to be honest.)


• Tone: not as "breezy"/informal as TVT, but with a mind toward encyclopedicness.  Need to balance informality to reach out to non-traditional userbase with long-term quality and "lastability" of that which is documented on the site.


• Keep the policy of ignoring notability.  Also use a policy of verifiability--that is, only works that have been published or otherwise released for general consumption.


• A warning that while these music tropes are devices used in music, simply stringing together some tropes does not coherent music make.


• System for upvoting/downvoting trope examples.


• Only registered users may edit.


• Trope proposals to be done through an accompanying forum, rather than...whatever YKTTW is.  I find its interface really hard to deal with.


• Maybe a term other than "trope" for what we currently call (music) tropes.

NOTE: I can't do this myself, since I don't know how to recode any wiki software to do the stuff I want it to do.  At this point I'm just wondering whether I should spend the time to help create this

This is such a bad idea for me right now; I have no time already...

ClockworkUniverse

I'd suggest calling it something other than that.

Neutral point of view (NPOV) policy

I think TV Tropes officially has that, but doesn't allow it to be enforced.

Overall, though, good idea.

Ironweaver

It is a good idea, but definitely needs another name, as "trope" is generally accepted as a solely literary term.

glennmagusharvey

More ideas:

• Instead of listing trope instances twice, once on the trope page as an example in a work and once on the work page as an trope instance, tropes should only be listed in the tropes list of a work.  This section should be marked with specific code that allows each trope page to have just a link to "works where [trope name] appears" that generates a list of all work pages that link to it.


• Work pages should have infoboxes that list things like, composer, original performer (if relevant), catalogue information ("Op. 9 #3", "BWV 912", "Side Three No. 6 from 'The Beatles'"), form ("song form", "sonata", "classical opera"), nominal tonality (if the work gives a key in its title), and maybe original instrumentation.

glennmagusharvey

^^ What would y'all suggest as a replacement for the term "trope"?

Ironweaver

I'm almost certain that there exists an appropriate name in musical terminology, but I don't have a single clue about musical theory.

ClockworkUniverse

^Same.

thenamelesssamurai

If we can get this up and running, I'd be happy to contribute to this any way I can, though most of my music theory knowledge is based in traditional classical music, with not a lot of experience in Pop, jazz or avant garde classical theory.

CountryPumpkin

I know absolutely nothing about hard theory itself, but I could write about relationships between music of different times and cultures and whatnot. Influences on pop culture and why, for example, Talking Heads wrote a song about a sympathetic terrorist or how "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" created the metal genre and how or the significance of The Soft Bulletin on music. If you'd like

MrW

It sounds like a good idea, but should it be a spin-off of TVT? It could be a regular wiki that goes into more detail about music theory and how different bands/songs/genres influenced the creation of new genres.

glennmagusharvey

Well i guess it could simply be "inspired by" TVT and not have much of anything to do with TVT itself.  I just figured I might as well copy some of the stuff I've written on TVT (such as for the article "Humoresque Progression") over to the new site.

Two more notes on aspects of TVT that I want to reproduce:

* You get different styles of creative work represented on TVT.  Thus, as I mentioned above, you can see really crazy cross-work commonalities, between classic literature and modern children's TV shows, for instance.  I want to see that same thing happen here, because I think there's a lot more in common among different pieces and styles of music than what's suggested by how divided music is into genres.  Also, not all genres categorize things the same way, so genres distinctions are a mess themselves.

* Cripes, I forgot what I was going to say.