I am adding some music from Beatport, and when I realised it conveniently lists the BPM and Key for music, I decided to add it to the work entries I had created. Unfortunately, for the fourth work/track musicbrainz will not let me set the key to A sharp major.
Beatport specifically says that this work is in “A♯ maj”. You can see it in the listing here:
For the time being, I just added it as an annotation.
Edit:@yvanzo found that the Keys are automatically determined.
Unfortunately I can’t make a new post for another 14 hours because I am a new user, so I need to write my reply here: If the Key and BPM is automatically generated, should I remove it and the BPM from the works I added?
I hesitate going against what the artist indicated; isn’t there a possibility if you use a differently tempered scale or something, that A♯ major could be different than B♭ major?
To be forthright, I don’t actually know if the work in question is untempered or if the writer just likes to be different and use an A♯ major scale where most others would write in B♭ major. I’m not musically minded enough to be able to recognise the difference anyway.
Oh, I did not open your link! The recording seems to be equally tempered. It is not clear whether the key notation is due to artist intent or to Beatport. Can you check that B♭ major is allowed in Beatport?
Indeed it’s not clear in this case whether that ‘key signature’ is the artist’s intent. In principle it could be intended to be A-sharp even with equal temperament, though I’m not sure how one would hear the difference. At any rate there are a number of romantic piano pieces written in D-flat major (as distinct from C-sharp).
I don’t know enough about Beatport, I just came across the release and decided to import it.
I would say that even though Beatport does not have any ‘B♭ major’ key songs, I think it’s possible that that could be an option. If you look at how they indicate keys for the track search:
https://www.beatport.com/tracks/all?key=<index>
There are a number of indexes that have no songs in that key; notably, index 2, 12, 15 through 18, and anything greater than 33 return no results. One of these index numbers could be assigned to ‘B♭ major’ right?
Here is the table I made if you want to look for yourself:
Are those keys algorithmically determined from the audio files? And if so, I wonder if they constitute sufficient evidence to enter the key in MusicBrainz?
From the list it looks like there is a policy to use A-sharp in preference to B-flat, maybe with one exception. But I suppose it could be somehow to do with the genres represented.
Yes. Nowadays nominal tonality is often defined from reading scale ascending; so what (would earlier have, and even now) is conceived and notated in (lowered) B-flat is automagically set to its (raised) enharmonic approxivalent (because popsters generally do not use traditional notation, thus are not subject to accidentals). There are, for instance, several electronic tuners with raised steps only.
IMHO yes, because Beatport auto-detected keys are not reliable, and BPMs don’t belong to the work. BPM will be supported as recording attribute any time soon (although it’s overdue).
