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Using Fractals To Classify Music
Brian McLaughlin writes "A company is working on software that can classify music with fractals and make it easier to find the tunes you want on the Web. Apparently, one can detect the type of music (jazz, heavy-metal, in-between, etc.) by detecting fractal patterns in the music."." I'm looking forward to the day when my music can be indexed and crossreferenced every which way: artist, tempo, year, style, similiarity, heck I wanna know when the Beastie Boys sample The Beatles and be notified and give the option to follow up on the samples within the songs. Someday... I hope.
Couldn't the reverse, then be done, to take a fractal "fingerprint" of a type of music (say, jazz), add some variables and come up with original music?
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If you've seen interviews with many artists, you've probably noticed how most of them hate to be classified. If this really works, it would kill a lot of pretension. I can see it now:
Reporter: Despite the fact that you're considered a rock artist, you seem to be having a great deal of success amongst the country and even R+B fans. Why do you think that is?
Artist: Well I don't really think of myself as a rcok musician. People are always trying to classify my music as pop, or hard rock, or soft rock, or whatever. But I don't restrict myself to those terms, I just think of myself as an artist, and I think my work really defies being simply classified as rock.
[Reporter looks down at a laptop, hits a few keys]
Reporter: No, the computer says it's clearly rock music. Not country, not big-band, not funk, not innovative-genre-transcending-art, just rock music.
Artist: Well, yes, but it's really-
Reporter: That's all the time we have for now. Tune in tomorrow as I interview another popular rock band.
This could create one hell of a visualization plugin for Winamp...
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