Style/Language: Difference between revisions

From MusicBrainz Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search
(comment (Imported from MoinMoin))
(No difference)

Revision as of 08:20, 1 March 2006

General Guidelines

When capitalizing song titles, album titles, or artist names, the appropriate grammatical rules for the language the text is written in should be applied unless it can be shown that that the artist wishes the capitalization to be grammatically incorrect, in which case the artist's version of the title or name is the correct one to use.

In the case where a title or name has been printed using different variations of capitalization, whether on a single release or across multiple releases and is therefore not consistently applied, and if there is no evidence that the artist has a preference, then the appropriate grammatical rules of the language in question should be applied regardless of what has been printed.

Language-Specific Guidelines

For more detailed information on language specific grammar rules, see the following pages or create one if a language is not represented here.

Note: If you are unsure about the language of a title, TellSimilarLanguagesApart might help. If you are unsure on how to apply the rules contact a moderator whose ModeratorLanguage fits.



Discussion

"Still, this leaves us with further problems: how to determine the language of ambiguous titles or titles with foreign words, and how to handle bilingual titles." --TomHull

  • My feeling here is that we should apply the language rules of the country of the artist's origin in cases where titles are ambiguous or bilingual. This won't help in all cases though. --TarragonAllen

"But, some titles are actually just descriptions, such as for symphonies, and need to be standardized." --Eric

  • Agreed. Classical and classicalesque releases such as movie and theatre scores are a completely different ballgame, and this should be dealt with in the ClassicalStyleGuide as a separate issue. --TarragonAllen

My proposed addition to the capitalisation style guide: If a song title contains a sub-sentence in brackets, the sub-sentence should be capitilised as though the brackets didn't exist. --JohnCarter

  • Title parts that are in parenthesis should be treated with the normal and appropriate grammatical rules for the language in question. The only time information in brackets is treated differently is if it is what I call "ExtraTitleInformation", which covers things like "(feat. Foo)", "(remixed by Foo)" and the other extra information we presently cater for. --TarragonAllen Examples: * "Have You Ever Been (to Electric Ladyland)" by Jimi Hendrix track link * "What Went Wrong (in Your Head)" by Supergrass track link * "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" by Elvis Costello track link Counter Examples: * "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue yster Cult track link ("(Don't Fear)" could be considered optional, so "The" should be capitalised as though it were at the start of the sentence) * "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" by Jimi Hendrix track link (Anything after the ... is a new sentence, so the "A" should be capitalised). --JohnCarter

Another proposed addition: If a track is clearly differentiated from other tracks on an album by its capitalization, then the capitalization should be preserved. For example, if an album is capitalized normally except for one track which is all caps, that track should be left in all caps. If the creators clearly intended it to be this way, then that information should be conveyed in MB. --DavidHolmes

Should 'the' and 'a' be capitalized in the middle of a sentence when it refers a another title?

  • March from A Clockwork Orange
  • March from a Clockwork Orange

or maybe even

  • March from "A Clockwork Orange"

also album titles featuring band names as in

  • Rock 'n' Roll With the Modern Lovers
  • Come On, Feel the Lemonheads --nschum
  • Yes, this is how we handle it. So March from A Clockwork Orange would be correct. But about Come On, Feel the Lemonheads I'm unsure because "the" is part of the sentence here so it should probably be lower case. --Shepard

I must vehemently disagree with all of what has been said above. Why should we have to *show* that the artist wishes the title to be incorrect? This project should be funamentally *descriptive*--we must doccument *fact*, even if the fact is that the Artist capitalized their title incorrectly.

The capitalization of a track, album, work title, or even their own name, is under the control of *the artist*. The poet e.e. cummings always has his name presented in lower case. Similarly many titles of poetry and pieces of music have their own capitalizations. I am a composer myself, and have written pieces with titles such as "steam", "KOOKS AMOK" "piano1r1" as well as pieces with 'standard' capitalization. Deciding on the capitalization is an *artistic decision* and changing the capitalization of an artist's work is tantamount to changing the notes in their composition.

There is no workable method to guess what is 'intentional' in a work of art--and aspects that were accidents at first may become intentional upon further reflection, such as the title of the Oasis album "On the Shoulder of Giants". The *only* case in which capitalization should be changed is if the artist formally retracted the title on later releases, and even then, the new capitalization should only be used *on those new releases*. The improperly spelled track by "Joe Artist in 1989" and "Joe Artist in 1990" represent disagreements between the same person at different points in time, and this change of mind must be recorded. It has even happened that artists have made bold artistic choices and then later dishonestly recounted them as 'mistakes', such as the opening feedback in "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles--if a later version of the track omitted this feedback, the original track should be preserved as the product of the Artist at the time--because there is no principled way to distinguish mistakes from actual artistic decisions which were later recounted under the false pretense of them being 'mistakes', we must preseve the original versions, rather than imposing our analysis upon the data.

In fact, because much of the activity of the human mind can become transparent to us, we may not even be qualified to determine if we did something 'by mistake' or 'by subconscious intention'. Are freudian slips mistakes, or are they communications which take the guise of mistakes for the protection that is offered by having plausible deniability?

The bottom line is: *document* and do not *correct*. We must report the facts as they are, mistakes and all.--adamgolding

  • and I disagree with that. If I wanted an exact replica of the cover, I would just scan the CD cover. The Manic Street Preachers nearly always write everything in all capitals, that's how the titles are displayed, not their real name. On Suede's Coming Up, almost everything is lowercase, on Dog Man Star, almost everything is uppercase. If we only allow exactly what's on the cover, we'll need one artist called SUEDE, one artist called suede and probably another called Suede. Looking through my CDs, a large proportion of them seem to have the titles in all capitals, but elsewhere (sometimes in the liner notes for the very same CD, the artist will refer to them not in all capitals. While there are some artists who title their songs consistently in one way, there are many who don't. Also, I really doubt that all the mistakes you can find on bootlegs are because the person who created the bootleg wanted to make unique titles, they're more than likely just errors. Furthermore, we need need some way of formatting the data that we don't access to the cover for, such as FreeDB imports. --Nikki
  • if the artist is inconsistent, then i would say we may use any version which actually occurs. however if an artist has two versions of a track title: "mY s0nG" and "mY sONg" i would say we can only choose between those two options. i don't mind having ways of choosing which version to use, but i see no reason to adopt spellings and/or capitalizations which never occured anywhere on a product released by the artist. also, as for bootleg misspellings, i agree with you that the bootlegger *probably* didn't make that mistake on purpose, but i could be mistaken about that--but i can't be mistaken about what spelling is actually on the sleeve. if we start correcting things, it opens up room for disagreements as to what's intentional, whereas if we simply transcribe faithfully, consensus is automatic. i might give in in the case of the bootlegger because *the bootlegger is not the artist*, but even so, when you correct the bootleg, some information is lost--the information that "there was a 'spelling mistake' of this kind on bootleg X". What if someone wanted to a statistical study of cumulative error in misspellings when bootlegs are made based on other bootlegs? (studies of this kind have been used to see how often scientists refer back to the original sources they cite--the analysis showed that the scientists are almost invariably lazy, :-9).
    • What about cases where the person who created the cover made an error? I can think of two cases off the top of my head where the track listing on the cover doesn't even match the CD (excluding hidden/bonus tracks, of course). That's hardly artist intent, and it just goes to show that the cover isn't always right. In the MB2, or whatever else it's called, there'll be a way of associating more than one title with a track, but until then it's better to stick with what we've got: people will only keep changing all the albums which are in all uppercase or all lowercase on the cover back to what they expect to see if we insist on replicating the cover (P.S. how can we replicate the font and colour too? 'cause those might just be artist intent too...)