Since November of 2011, our research of East Asian Music Culture, built a music database called EMDB (Ewha Music Database, 2011~2014) and EMDB II (East Asian Music Database, Innovative and Inclusive, 2014~2017). They are unique as it contains a vast array of primary music sources of the 20th century East Asia, namely, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, in one place for the first time in history. The reason our research team dedicated the past eight years to establish such databases is that there has been no database for modern and contemporary music of East Asia available until this point. There have been a few archives or documentation of primary music sources of the modern era from the region, yet those include only one culture as in the case of collections in Japan’s Diet Library and Kunitachi Library. As there has been no prior or concrete model to follow in the region, we have been dealing with many technical, practical, as well as philosophical issues in developing our databases, especially establishing the second Database (EMDB II) of composers, compositions, and performances of the contemporary music of East Asia. As it is technically innovative as its 3.0 symentic web system allows users to engage in dialogues with each other, and also with the composers for providing more accurate information of such a vast culture specific materials. Some features in EMDB II, such as ‘timeline’ and ‘events’, providing socio-cultural overview of the 20th century East Asia are especially useful for anyone who wants to learn more about the background of or positioning individual composers or compositions beyond just sonic experience.
As with its 3.0 symentic technological advancement in EMDB II, this paper will focus on the technical merits, its design and web system and advocate the importance of using integrated and dialogic approaches in building database. Our research team hopes to generate further discourses on the more advanced development of music culture specific contents.