Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I have a Feature Suggestion...

But first, one of the reasons that I would like to see this feature added to the site. Many times I would like to hear something new, but unfortunately (for some) I tend to be a MEGA-snob when it comes to music. I have very exacting standards of how music should be played (and I wish sometimes I could play up to them completely myself ), but I'm not always thrilled by many performances that I hear - although they may seem FANTASTIC for others ... (hopefully that's enough creeping around the subject that someone will get the point) ... considering all that, it would be nice to be able to have some way to seek out music that will more closely meet my own standards of stuff to listen to so ...

My suggestion is to place some kind of feature somewhere on the website that anyone who has posted music to the main site has access to ... it would be a kind of "personal favourites" board or poll or page, and here's how it would work. Each and every performer on the site would get to register (perhaps in their profile, perhaps on a page one would need to sign in to access) their five (maybe ten, maybe two - haven't really decided ...) favourite recordings from THIS SITE ONLY. For example I could go into this page and select from all the recordings posted which five recordings I feel are the absolute best on the site. Then I could check/uncheck a box to allow others to see my selections at will. But the real reason this could be useful would be that all the various choices of everyone would be tallyed together to list the "Musicians' choice" listing, where the top say 100 pieces with the most internal votes would be listed. The download statistics do this to some extent but since they are mere statistics for what the general public likes to hear they really have a completely different function (and I agree that it's a useful (sometimes depressing) function). These five choices that each would have could be dynamic and changeable so that new music could be changed, for example when Monica posts a brilliant performance of one of my favourite Scriabin pieces, I would have the option to remove my vote for one of my other choices (say a Breemer Bartok rendition) to reflect my new choice of five favourites, with Monica's Scriabin Piano Sonata No 9 as the #1 choice ... for example ... . Although I see nothing wrong with allowing people to vote for their own, perhaps a mechanism might be in order to allow only up to three self-votes.

There are many different ways that this idea could be implemented and that's why I'm posting this suggestion. Also this could be a great way to learn more about other people here in the forum, you could go to their profile page and (if they allowed it to be visible) see which were their five favourite postings on this site. This should naturally be limited only to songs posted on this site, and it should be a function reserved only for musicians (i.e. most, if not all, of the people who have accounts in the forum) - it would be more secure from external takeover by bots if it was limited to people who have posted music that was accepted here, but many musicians in preparation of posting (I feel) would also have legitimate votes to add to the totals.

What does everyone else think about this idea?

Are there other ways to implement this functionality?

Do you have any technical ideas to assist the site administrators/ webmasters to develop this idea?

My suggestion is calling it the musician's choice list or something like that. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Love is the law, love under will.
Aryobrand

P.S. How come the Bartok Mikrokosmos page is blank? and are you waiting for me to post more Wagner in order to link up the Wagner page?

I've had similar thoughts before, but some members here are adamant that the recordings should remain unrated, and that the site should be about providing free recordings rather than competition or judgment (beyond the initial audition). I'm guessing that the admins lean toward the latter view, because it would be relatively simple to employ a ratings system, and if they wanted to do it, I think they'd have done it long since.

The closest thing to it is the "most popular recordings/artists" feature, which does not really help when you are looking for the best recording of a particular piece and don't feel like listening to all 10 of them (or however many there are). Anyway, though I would love a rating system, I respect the wishes of the admins on the matter.

You know, Michael, I've been thinking of trying out some Scriabin one of these days. However, I have two reservations: 1. Don't know where to start. 2. Now I'm afraid of not measuring up.

Seriously, I get what you are saying, but my thoughts are that this could hurt people's feelings too much. Imagine a poor member who has no stars or whatever next to his/her name. Or the member who was ranked as a favorite by a certain member, but then was bumped off when a better recording came in by a different member. That kind of thing saddens me, but maybe that's just me.

We had a discussion similar to this in another thread. Here is the link:

http://server3.pianosociety.com/new/php ... ing+system

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I looked at that other thread, and that's something that's kind of similar but not really what I meant. The feature that I'm suggesting would be more like the "Download Statistics" page. The difference would be that the 'ratings' would not be based upon how popular a piece is with the general public, nor would it be a measure of how many songs one has posted on Piano Society, nor should it have the same fluctuations that one sees right after anything new is posted. This would be internal to the forum, yet linked up to the Piano Society Home Page, and every one who posts any musical contribution to the site would get a vote. A side-thought that I had is that this might serve some people as an extra incentive to post more songs if someone were to receive an extra vote for every additional fifteen songs past say some-number base songs. You could set a ceiling at twenty votes top for anyone.

Furthermore, each member would have the option to turn the visibility of their own choices off by unchecking a CheckBox control. Their votes would still be tallyed in the "Musician's Choice" page, but wouldn't show up on their profile page or ToolTips (see below).

An example is in order ... Say for example I'm new to this site, and (remember this is hypothetical) I've never heard of Granados before. I knew from perusing the forum that pianolady was a big Granados fan, so I figure that I could trust her judgement when it came to Granados performances. In this case, I would go to pianolady's profile page and find out that she left the checkbox unchecked (that only she had access to) which allowed me to see that her all-time favourite recording on the site by Granados was something called "Lento con extasis" by someone named Monica Alianello. I could then click the link and that particular song would play for me. My opinion of Granados' compositions would then have an introduction through this 'chosen-for-me-by-a-known-Granados-aficionado' song instead of through the song called "TheSongByGranadosWhichMonicaIsTheMostDispleasedWithHerPersonalPerformanceOn". This has allowed me to hear a song by an unknown composer which an individual has chosen as one of her five voting choices.

To extend this example, say I didn't know the difference between a pianolady and a technaut and couldn't really find out which Scriabin song technaut preferred. Checking his profile page showed that he checked the box on his page to prevent everyone from seeing that he chose all of his own songs for all twenty of his votes (if the additional votes rules are implemented). Well, I would still like to hear something by Scriabin, so I go to the "Musician's Choice" page and filter "By Composer" and choose "Scriabin", the piece with the most votes (this would work out in practice to be from only among people who felt that a recording of Scriabin's music was among their favourite five recordings on the site {this guarantees that people who love Bach will have more weight in a Bach vote, people who love Rachmaninoff will have more weight in a Rachmaninof vote, etc} ), then at the "Musician's Choice" page they would find that the best Scriabin song, tallyed from votes of Scriabin lovers would be "Piano Sonata no.3 op.23" performed by someone named (for example) Tania Stavreva. This would give me a much more accurate appreciation of Scriabin's music as a person who's never even heard of Scriabin beyond rumours that 'he was wierd'.

As far as the issue of people's feelings being hurt, the Download Statistics can do that just as easily for someone whose own favourite recording only has (remember these are all hypothetical examples here ) 10 downloads of themself on the Cumulative May statistics, and yet one of their worst performances has 137. An additional feature would be a rating that each Artist page has suggesting their own best performance, so Monica could tell all visiting public members that they should first listen to her recording of "X" rather than "that-other-one-they-were-going-to-chose-just-because-it-was-more-popular".

This could be expanded or curtailed in many ways, for example a ToolTip that pops up when you hold your cursor over the song name that reads:

Musician's Choice #1 rated by:
....Your name here
....Some other person's name that posts way too few songs here
....Secret Choice
....That other guy's name

I can understand not wanting to hurt people's feelings, but the way I see it, if my name wasn't somewhere in some filtered category of Musician's Choice that would more likely spur me on to do a better job - whereas seeing my own name appearing say for example at position 139 (completely hypothetical here, remember!) in the Download Statistics would merely make me say "Stupid public wouldn't know the difference between A flat and G sharp in mean temperament!" and might (hypothetically, of course) lead me to neglect posting further recordings since I might feel that my recordings just weren't appreciated there, so why bother! ... er ... one might say

Remember that for this to work, only other musicians would vote for other (or their own - which could inform us how self-absorbed they were - or could also serve as a way for someone to boost their own or someone-they-feel-sorry-for's status ... ). and the other CRUCIAL factor is that everyone that posts music to the main site would start out with ONLY FIVE choices (until they post their, say, sixteenth song in which case they'd get SIX choices - then for number thirty-one, SEVEN choices - up to a maximum of TWENTY choices total.)

I think the fluctuations that one sees might be a reminder to people to record and post new songs, rather than a letdown. The worst thing for a musician is for him to rest upon previously won laurels!!! Don't I know it.

What it would NOT be is a button next to each song that someone could continuously press, nor would it be a popularity contest (since people could keep their choices secret), but it would greatly help people who would like to hear something by "NameSomeone" but they don't know where to start.

I know this sounds complicated, but I think it's more complicated to explain, so let me know if you're unclear of what I mean.

Love is the law, love under will.
Aryobrand

P.S. Monica, if you're serious about learning a Scriabin song, I could help you to find something suitable if you let me know what kind of song you're looking for... difficulty level ... length of song ... early Chopinesque ... middle period ... late exalted stage ... Vivace ... Lento ... Moderato ... romantic ... harsh ... evil and twisted ... lascivious ... passionate ... etc. If you want, start another thread about that subject, then tell me where you have posted it in your reply to this post. I'm sure others here would have ideas as well (but of course mine would be the best ideas, naturally )

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Another thought just occurred to me, that if someone had some really strong personal reason for not wanting this functionality at any cost, they could private message me (if that works on this forum) and I could try to figure out a way to eliminate their particular issue - to build the solution into the suggestion. I would definitely keep all confidential communications confidential - I don't need that kind of karma for betrayal, so let me know if you don't want the idea discussed openly. Of course all names would be confidential for ALL private messages.

Barring the finding of a workable solution, the entire feature could be turned off for any individual that did NOT want their songs to show up in Musician's Choice AT ANY COST. Then in place of, for example,

"Artist's Personal Choice:
Monica suggests listening to her song: Ach Du Lieber Aryobrand"

appearing at the top of Monica's Bio page, it would merely say,

"Monica has chosen not to accept ratings,
please make donations to Piano Society instead."

This could be turned on and off by each artist by checking/unchecking a box in their profile, in case they change their mind later.

Love is the law, love under will.
Aryobrand

You crack me up, Michael!

I understand your idea and appreciate the points you make. But it sounds like it would take a great deal of time for Robert and Chris to implement and I am pretty sure they don’t have the time. We’ll see if either of them chimes in here.

And yes – I am serious about Scriabin. I mentioned it to my teacher a few months ago but I was doing so many other things at the time that we never pursued it. I’m currently taking a break from lessons so I do need some guidance.

As to what to start with – I am aware of Scriabin’s three periods, and I would like to explore each one. I will start a new thread in the “Repertoire” forum.

I've not read through all of this, but it sounds like here are some nice ideas to spice up the site.

If we had a staff of bright young eager-beaver web developers we would surely jump onto ideas like this - this site is terribly static and rather boring as it is. It would be great if it was a bit more lively like FaceBook for example. It would be great if we could integrate the new Google Waves technology so that any number of people could post and chat in a topic. There's so much we could do... the possibilities are endless.

However we don't have these resources. There's just the two of us (very occasionally 3 of us) who can at times hardly keep up with the daily load and maintenance. Some of us have a day job and we'd like to play some piano ourselves every now and then ).

So I guess you know the answer ! Of course Michael, if you (or anyone else) were to volunteer implementing this, that could surely change things

I haven't submitted any recordings, but I'd like to say that while the idea sounds interesting, I do not think it would be a good one for visitors and non-members like me. From what I understand, to be on the site, a recording has to have a certain quality ; when I see a recording here, I'm assuming it meets certain criteria. It also emphasizes the idea that there is no set interpretation of a piece, but many possible ; I suppose most people do like me and listen to several recordings while following the sheet music. There are some recording that are definitly good, but that I definitly can't stand, and I would rate them down if I could, not because they lack quality, but because they completly contradict my utterly personnal vision of the piece ; I'm not sure I'm interested in the view of the majority, I'm already too insecure in my own interpretation to see those that ressemble mine rated down and those that make opposed choices rated up by the crowds !
Still, there is no discussing rating is a useful tool ; but if it were present, I'd love it if it could also be turned invisible.
I might sound strange, but I think there are some arguments in what I say...

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.



In the system feature that I proposed there would be no voting down. Each musical contributer would get to choose five (total) pieces out of everything on the site and these would appear on their profile page as your Musician's choice. Then these five votes ONLY along with everyone else's would be tallyed into the main "Musician's choice" page.

Of course built in to the design would be the ability of every contributing musician to turn the feature completely off for their pieces, or just to make the individual Musician's choice on their personal profile page completely invisible.

Also, there would be no marks next to any pieces on the site showing a 'rating', with one exception. If a piece was chosen as ANYONE's #1 choice, that information would show up in a ToolTip when one held the cursor over the name of the piece. If the person that had voted that song as their #1 choice chose to remain invisible, the ToolTip would say something like "Secret Ballot #1 Choice". In this way you could conceivably even vote for your own piece as #1 choice, or the piece of someone else whom you feel isn't getting enough credit due to low downloads, etc. Naturally the vast majority of songs on the site would have no such ToolTips, i.e.:

(freq: ToolTipped songs) = ((# total recordings) - (# duplicate votes)) / ( total # of performers)




I completely agree, that's why I suggested some of these in the longer posts above. I think it was more confusing describing what I meant rather than the actual feature.

Love is the law, love under will.
Aryobrand

P.S. As per the webmaster's comments, this type of feature would require volunteers to code it. I was thinking of volunteering for this, but I'm currently back in school. (Busy Busy Busy - some days I can't even TOUCH a piano ) The bright side is that one of the subjects I'm studying is Java Development through J2EE/J2SE also using EJB, etc. So there's a remote chance that I might be willing to code these features in the future (If I get good enough which would only be natural ), but it would definitely not take place until at least next summer.

Ugh, EJB... I don't think we want to start running Java application servers on the site only for the puepose of some fancy site extension. I would propose that any enhancements we consider should be done as lean and mean as possible.

I think computers and Java are just like playing piano under an heavy, humid, stormy, tropical weather. You push the keys but you never know what kind of sound is going to come out of it !

I actually like Java a lot and have been dabbling in it considerably. But I've never kept up with the myriad of developments around it, J2EE being one of them. You don't seem to hear much of it these days, some say the whole Java scene is on its way out. It's certainly not the answer to everything. In our company we find that many customers, after disastrous Java (and .Net) adventures, are returning to our good old 4GL product.

If I may chime in here. There are a few simple methods to do what the original author suggested and to get the site moving forward. At the end of the day, as techneut wrote, in recent month, the Piano Society has been stale and lacking activity. I often come to visit, but I rarely see anyone online or new topics.
So here are the ideas/methods

- use ning.com to further develop the community. The idea is to completely move the site to a ning.com social site

-since the Piano Society uses phpbb2, there are many social modules available at phpbbhacks.com .Lets use them(including an event calendar)

-I like the idea of the author and to respond to pianolady, such a feature, along with critics would allow for people to work on improving. For example, lets say that I listen to a piece played by Josh and I dont like the way he performs the piece. Well, I would vote down and explain in the comments section why and if possible write suggestions on correcting..
Then, if he wanted it, Josh could go and work on correcting what I indicated and come back with a new recording of the same piece.

Also, lets not forget one thing. Whether people are professionals or amateurs, at the end of the day, people are likely to face criticism anytime they play. Me thinks it is way better for people to get used to criticism.

Great that people have all these ideas to pimp up the site, or even move it to another technology.

My usual response: who's volunteering ? As for myself, I have a day job, a family, a very demanding hobby, plus PS and church duties. No way I am going to invest lots of extra time in the site. As for Monica and Robert, they have their own things too. As it happens, we can only keep up because things are a bit slow here - dunno what would happen if we had many more active pianists, and dozens of new submissions every day.

Ideas are great. What we need is hands. It peeves me a bit when people say 'let's do this and let's do that' (note the plural !) but really expect somebody else to do it. It also peeves me when someone complains there's nothing new when he decides to drop in once in a blue moon. Actually, Avguste, you only post here when you want something, like an event calendar for which you have been lobbying before.

This site does not need the newest gadgets. It needs people to come in and talk. Sadly, many people drop out after a while, and we seen to have lost many core members. I guess it just happens like that, whatever the technology.

Hello Everyone:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I haven't been as active lately as I should be, I'll confess first thing, but I've been super busy and still am - decided to finally stop putting off finishing that Bachelor's degree, along with a couple Professional Certificates and Certifications as well.



This sounds like a lot more work than my idea suggested, and I was under the impression that the main problem was man-power. Hopefully some of my computer programming classes will pay off in improved coding skills, but until I finish I personally won't be able to take on such a project (maybe then...we'll see )



Unfortunately, Avguste, this isn't any part of my idea. I wouldn't be in favour of any mechanism to vote someone else's performance DOWN, that's what the forum is already for I thought! If someone has honest critique of a performance, tactfully approach the subject in the forum is usually the most direct way to assist others. Most people I've talked with here love to get feedback on their playing - that's how we grow and improve. I know that's my preferred method of critiques, both giving and getting. Or if one feels the critique isn't for public consumption there's always the private messaging feature. I know I'm still meaning to get enough time to go through one critique that I've received that way, which I appreciate tremendously. But my University schedule keeps me busier than is probably good for me, but in the end it will pay off.

...anyways, My idea was to only allow people to vote for a specific number of "recommendations" to a number of pieces to be determined by some arcane equation involving the derivative of the square root of the number of songs posted minus an adjustment factor all divided by the number of posts they've made to the forum adjusted by the length of their membership .... or something like that. Then when someone new hovers their mouse over the text link to a piece the ToolTip generates how many "recommendations" that piece received. I'd expect that most of the songs would have one recommendation (since you can recommend your own pieces or all of your recommendations to the same piece if you REALLY like it). The usefulness would be, say if I had never heard of Chopin before, I could see which Chopin piece on the site was the most recommended and start there. But as was brought out before the major obstacles are the manhours to code it. At least that's how I interpreted it.



You know, on this point, I tend to agree since the music industry can be mean, rotten, and nasty. Anyone that's "toured" knows this. However, I like to look at Piano Society as a forum where we can all exchange techniques and repertoire with other musicians. I personally think that just going online will tend to develop a person's skin thickness, I would only critique with constructive criticism here personally, and I'm not accusing you of suggesting such either. It's for that reason that my idea only entails the ability of every CONTRIBUTING* member the ability to recommend pieces, and not criticize them. A subtle but important distinction. Does that make my sometimes wordy explanations easier to understand?

* Contributing member to be understood as providing quality recordings for inclusion in Piano Society's database collection (as well as perhaps having some activity within the fora.)

Love is the law, love under will.
Aryobrand
(who must now return to Economics homework...both micro and macro!)