Music Match lets people involved in classical and modern music - performers, composers, technicians - discover each other, communicate, and collaborate.
Music Match is designed to serve musicians of all levels, both amateur and professional.
Music Match doesn't store scores or sound files; sites like IMSLP, SoundCloud, and YouTube do that just fine. Rather, Music Match is like LinkedIn or Match.com for classical music. Its goal is to catalyze the composition and performance of new music by connecting people.
To use Music Match, you create an "account" with a user name, email address, and password. You can optionally provide your country and postal code (e.g. ZIP code) - this lets you search for musicians located near you.
You can create "profiles" describing yourself as a composer, as a performer, and/or as a technician. For example, your composer profile includes
Performer profiles are similar. Technician profiles say what areas and software you know about,
You don't have to create profiles. If you don't, you can still use Music Match to search for other musicians - but no one will find you in their searches.
If you belong to an performance ensemble (orchestra, choir, chamber group, etc.) you can tell Music Match about the ensemble. This has two purposes:
Each Music Match ensemble has an associated "founder". If members of the (real-life) ensemble have Music Match accounts, they can be linked to the ensemble on Music Match.
Music Match lets you search for people (performers, composers, technicians), or ensembles. You can specify the attributes - instruments, styles, difficulty levels - that you're looking for. You can limit your search to nearby people.
The result of a search is a list of people. For each person, you see a summary of their profiles (composer, performer, or technician). If you asked for nearby people, you see how far away they are. If they included an "audio signature" in their profile, you can play it by mousing over their name. This lets you browse search results quickly.
When you find someone who interests you - say a composer whose works you might want to perform - you can browse their links. Then you can communicate with them using "private message" - perhaps to ask them a question about one of their works, or to commission a new piece.
Music Match also has a message-board system, with various top-level topics, for public discussions. You can create "threads" and post in existing threads. You can "subscribe" to a thread, in which case you'll be notified of new posts in that thread.
If you connect with someone interesting on Music Match, you can become "friends" with them - one of you makes a friend request, the other accepts it. You'll be notified of your friends' activities. When you view someone's profile, you see your friends too; this is a good way to discover people.
Music Match notifies you about various things that happen while you're away:
Music Match is a non-profit project based at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Dr. David P. Anderson. The source code is on Github.
The data collected by Music Match will not be sold, distributed, or used for other purposes. You can delete your account, in which case all data about you will be removed.