1. A New Object of Management
For decades, the development of music software has focused on managing music files, music collections, playlists, metadata, and other objects that describe musical works. During this time, music software has developed the ability to work efficiently with these objects. Modern systems can classify musical works, analyze their acoustic characteristics, generate recommendations, and automatically create playlists. For an information system, music is represented by files, metadata, and acoustic characteristics. For the listener, the meaning of music is shaped by the subjective musical experience of perceiving it. The same musical work may evoke entirely different emotions, memories, associations, and aesthetic impressions in different listeners. It is this subjective musical experience that makes music personal. However, modern music software largely fails to represent subjective musical experience in its information model.
2. The Limitation of Existing Music Software
Most existing music software manages a music collection. It manages files, albums, artists, playlists, metadata, and probabilistic models of user preferences.
Yet almost none of these systems treats subjective musical experience as an independent object of management.
As a result, accumulated subjective musical experience remains primarily in the listener's memory and almost never becomes part of the information system.
3. A New Paradigm
We believe that subjective musical experience can become a full-fledged object of management within an information system. To achieve this, it must be represented as structured data that can be captured, structured, stored, supplemented, and reused. Only in this form does it become part of the system's information model.
4. PMEMS
For this reason, we propose a new category of software:
Personal Music Experience Management System (PMEMS).
The primary object of management in a PMEMS is not a music file, a link to a musical work, or a playlist, but the listener's structured subjective musical experience.
The music collection remains an important part of the system, but it is organized not only according to the objective characteristics of musical works, but also according to the listener's subjective perception of them.
5. Transforming Experience into Operational Data
PMEMS captures and structures subjective musical experience, transforming it into operational data suitable for algorithmic processing.
Captured emotions, impressions, associations, memories, personal evaluations, and listening context are used for:
- organizing a music collection;
- searching for subjectively similar musical works within managed collections based on user-defined subjective characteristics;
- generating smart playlists based on structured subjective musical experience;
- generating smart playback queues based on structured subjective musical experience;
- creating personalized listening scenarios based on structured subjective musical experience.
6. The Listener Remains the Author of Their Experience
PMEMS does not position humans in opposition to algorithms.
Algorithms are capable of analyzing musical works and identifying statistical patterns. However, subjective musical experience always belongs to the individual listener and cannot be extracted directly from the musical work itself.
Therefore, the purpose of PMEMS is not to predict the listener's experience, but to capture, structure, and make use of it.
7. An Open Category
PMEMS is conceived as an open software category.
Any software system may be classified as a PMEMS if it conforms to the published category definition and classification criteria.
The category is defined not by a particular implementation, but by its object of management.
8. Philophonist
At the time of publication, Philophonist is the first known implementation of the Personal Music Experience Management System (PMEMS) category.
Philophonist demonstrates one possible implementation of this concept but does not limit its future development.
We invite software developers, researchers, musicians, musicologists, and listeners to contribute to the development of the PMEMS category, propose new ideas, create new implementations, and expand our understanding of what the management of subjective musical experience can become.
9. Conclusion
Music becomes truly personal only when the focus is on the listener rather than solely on the musical work.
PMEMS represents the transition from managing a music collection to managing subjective musical experience.
10. Citation
PMEMS Manifesto: The Philophonist Manifesto.
Philophonist Project.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21061054