News Story

Listening Experience Database launches

Alessandro Adamou, Friday 13 Dec 2013

The Listening Experience Database (LED), a crowd-sourced collection of documented evidence of listening to music, went public this week.

LED is a collaboration between the Open Univerity and the Royal College of Music aimed at producing the world’s first database that captures the impact of music on the lives of people. Though the LED site has been online and publicly accessible since mid 2013, it is now welcoming external members to contribute any listening experiences in their possession. The initial dataset is comprised of over 200 entries. You are invited to discover what music influenced the style and works of Benjamin Britten; which figures in British literature of the 18th and 19th Century ever witnessed a live performance of Handel’s "Messiah"; how many were enraptured by a tune during their travels to Rome, and more. As the database opens to crowd-sourcing, it now opens to records from any cultural context, source material, musical genre or historical period since the 13th Century, so long as it is documented and in English, either originally or in translation.

The entire implementation of the database is being led by the KMi Linked Data team, from the back-end to the Web user interface. The LED data storage facility is entirely based on Linked Data, meaning that we reuse content from authoritative external sources right from the start of a record creation phase, and make user-generated data quickly available for other users to benefit from and reuse in their future records. Every phase of database population, from drafting to review and approval, is natively implemented using Semantic Web technologies and standards.

By opening to the crowd-sourcing community, we are now entering the public beta phase of this implementation, which the LED team continues to improve upon and tweak to fit emerging user requirements.