Improving data about music education

#1

After a small conversation on Twitter I thought it could be nice to improve the way we store information about music education, since that’s definitely underrepresented online. For now I’ve added the option to specify what instrument or subject an artist taught another or taught at an educational institution (I’ve added a few possible non-instrument subjects based on what the music uni here in Estonia teaches, but I’d be happy to get more suggestions of what subjects we should have).

I was thinking about whether we could have a specific tab for educational institution places dedicated to teachers and students. Are there any other improvements you could think of?

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#2

It’s super that you have added instruments!!
Should we included dance, mime and all sorts of things you may perform in concerts?

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#3

If those are taught as actual subjects, maybe! (this is mostly, but not only, for formal education). I know dance is, at least.

#4

Things like singing, tapdancing etc. is still pretty much relevant for MB, but when we start going into “miming” and “acting” it starts veering too far away from mb’s core point I think. (it’s musicbrainz not performance brainz)
On the flip side if we do allow things that are “performance (with music)” that will expand MusicBrainz’ role (and that’s fine with me, we already do have photographers for example)
But that should require a wider community discussion imho.

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#5

Another thing I thought about is that we could specify at what level someone studied where (so, bachelor studies, master studies, postgraduate, etc). I think this is a fairly international scale that would be reasonable enough to have as a small set of attributes, but what do others think?

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#6

I don’t know…
All the cases I’d like to add to MB are non diploma things… so it would be nice to keep it optional. :slight_smile:

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#7

Oh it would absolutely be optional! :slight_smile: The student relationships (especially artist-artist, but probably also artist-place) can also be used for much more informal (but still “serious”) education, and a lot of those won’t really fit into a standard. Say “learned the piano with his mother” or “studied the folk music of the area with traditional musician X”.

I’m just thinking of how to properly model something like “graduated from the Eastman School with a bachelor’s degree and a performer’s certificate in viola in 1939, and a master’s degree in 1948”. It could be one rel (ended in 1948), or two (one ending 39, one 48 - that’s what I have now) or two, but specifying one is a bachelor’s and one is a master’s degree. I feel that last one would be much more clear.

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#8

Added three options (“Bachelor’s degree”, “Doctoral degree”, “Master’s degree”) under a “level of studies” attribute to the artist-place “studied at” relationship. While clearly not complete, these levels apply nowadays to most of Europe and a fair amount of other countries. We will probably want to eventually expand them for earlier historical needs and for other current systems - but I don’t know enough about those at the moment, so hopefully people will request them as needed :slight_smile:

Edit: this is a separate attribute and as such not mandatory at all for the relationship - if these don’t apply, just use the relationship normally and request a level if you think it should be added.

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