Our on-topic page currently says that 'identifying a... technique' is off topic, but does that reflect our current feelings?

Question

I see some 'identifying a technique' questions that are closed...

• What Instruments could have been used to make this 'seashell'-sound? (though that's more identifying an instrument than a technique)

But generally, I think I see more that are left open and are mildly well-received:

• How is the 'natural autotune' singing effect achieved?
• What is the violin technique in this video called?
• What is this guitar trick of partially touching the strings called?
• What is this ("frequent vibrato") vocal technique called?
• What's the name of this guitar technique?
• How to play this kind of "growly" sound in the guitar?

I am 100% aware and supportive of the idea that just because one, or 6, or a thousand questions of a certain type are open on the site doesn't mean that they should be allowed under our current rules. The rules may have changed since they were posted, or they may just have been missed.

However, I can't find any discussion in meta where people are passionately arguing for questions regarding identifying techniques to be closed, so I'm wondering what our actual feelings are about these questions.

Answer 1

These type of questions have innate problems that do not align well with the long term goals of the site along with the quality of the content.

Before I get into specifics, I will cite the tour of our site:

Music Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for musicians, students, and enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about music practice, performance, composition, technique, theory, or history.

So all of the questions we answer go into our library of questions which is only useful to future users if we can find them. The goal is eventually that we already have the answers for the users and just have to show them where it is. These questions will be more noise long term than use for several reasons.

1. They are tied to off site content that may rot away. Specifically, all the question rely on links off site that might one day be removed or changed. Since this was the core of the question, without the link neither the question nor the answer will make sense. This is also why an answer should just be a link somewhere else. This is not something that is unheard of and in fact has happened in the past to questions in a similar vein.

2. Questions are vague what they are about until someone listens to the link, hence even well written questions will be hard to search the actual content of the question. So allowing these questions will add unsearchable questions to our library.

3. The questions are typically only useful to the user since the clip itself is the subject rather than the technique and there will always be more clips out there. This is also the typical reason for not allowing ID questions since the usefulness past the initial user is always questionable and there can be near infinite of them. So allowing these questions will take up a bulk of our content and only be useful for the asker.

4. The question's topic quality is innately low. If we were to allow this, a perfectly on topic question would be "What is this technique?" with the post itself just contain a link and a time which is not a very high quality base for these types of questions. We could introduce minimum requirements to mitigated this, but there are on topic questions that need this that we are not doing so expanding the scope for questions with this innate problem will not improve site quality. (current example of quality problems can be seen in this quesiton What is this sound effect? (Lady Gaga's Monster))

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We can instead be helpful to the user by pointing them to the chat if they need it to be identified then ask an on-topic question about the technique if they still need help. This way we have users guide them to content that others have asked before or create new content if it does not. We're already having quality problems with on topic questions and adding more questions that will have similar problems is not a very good idea.

Answer 2

My feeling is that “identifying a technique” is perfectly acceptable if it could help users to become better musicians/sound technicians, since it seems that's the core purpose of this community. I understand that questions asking how to play a particular song aren't of much help, because they'd help only people who wants to play it, but I believe that techniques that can be applied in several songs are welcome. After all, what differs an amateur musician that knows all the theory from a seasoned musician that also knows the theory, other than practice and a lot of techniques? Techniques can be teached (like in this video), so users with more knowledge can share it with other users… Our Tour page says “With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about music practice, performance, composition, technique, theory, or history.” (my emphasis).

I also notice that some questions about audio techniques (related to music, of course) are also well-received (and I think they should, indeed).

Ok, users could search for that info on the internet (I guess there are a lot of references and tutorials there), but I also think that several well-written searches would hit this community. And the more it has answers for those questions, the more users will join and embrace it and make it better and popular.

Answer 3

I posted this question without having a strong opinion either way - I still don't really, but will post some thoughts!

The very relevant point has been mentioned that the stated purpose of SE sites is to build a "library of detailed answers to every question" about their respective topics. If the operative word there is 'library', maybe we don't want to open the site to a potentially countless number of questions about a countless number of pieces..?

On the other hand, we could read into that phrasing that we want to allow "every question" (where on-topic). That would be fair enough too - the worldbuilding site, for example, says that it aims to "build a library of detailed answers to every question about worldbuilding" - and that's an unlimited set.

So I think it's up to us what we regard as the long-term goals of the site. And arguably, because we allow analysis questions about (potentially) every song, we've already chosen the broader-minded view - that we're (in theory) happy with a potentially unlimited number of questions.

The point has been well-made that it's not necessarily as easy to search for these questions as some other types. And though this is true, I think there's still a whole range of ways in which people might find these questions...

• Good descriptive titles that include the name of the work in question, and the technique (once we've identified it)
• Tags
• HNQs and the site homepage, for new questions
• 'similar questions', on the right hand bar
• external links to the SO site, and external searches
• User profiles

So what would be the downsides? I think one problem that Dom pointed out is the site facilities - we don't have native video or sound embedding the way we can currently host pictures, and that's an impediment to asking and (especially) answering. One can imagine that with a site that can use your webcam to take a quick video on request, many questions could be answered easily.

Ultimately I think the most important thing would be the balance of the number of people interested in and able to answer these questions vs the number of people asking them. That balance is crucial and perhaps hard to assess while these questions aren't a major fixture on the site.

One final thought is that in a few years, it may be that transcription software has progressed to the point that many music snippets can be substantially transcribed automatically. So it may be that if we hold off long enough, the demand will go away...