Communicating mood in MEAD

MEAD is a standard to communicate “rich” metadata about sound recordings, releases and musical works. (PIE is a similar standard for “rich” information about musicians and other parties involved in creating and marketing the music). Two aspects of this rich information about music are the theme and the mood of the music. The way in which mood information is communicated has changed between MEAD 1.0 and 1.1. 

Mood in MEAD 1.0

MEAD 1.0 has a composite for the communication of a mood of a release, resource or work. In all instances the composite has the same structure —allowing to communicate a DDEX-defined value (e.g. Happy) or a free-form description. The composite also supports the differentiation of such information by country. However, the composite has a slightly different meaning as is evident from its name:

  • The SoundRecordingInformation and ReleaseInformation composites contain Mood (with a cardinality of 0-n); and

  • The WorkInformation composite contains LyricsMood (also with a cardinality of 0-n).

Mood in MEAD 1.1

MEAD 1.1 has harmonised these two tags into one tag Mood which exists in the three aforementioned composites SoundRecordingInformation, ReleaseInformation and WorkInformation; they all have the same syntax.

To differentiate whether a mood applies to the lyrics, the melody or both, DDEX has introduced a MoodType attribute into version 1.1. It can be set to Lyrics, Melody to LyricsAndMelody.

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