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New Computer Program Determines "Hitability"
illuminatedwax writes "It looks like the process of homogenizing the mediocrity of Top 40 radio is going to be aided by a computer, according to an
article from the Music Industry News Network. Polyphonic HMI has developed a new program called Hit Song Science (HSS) and compares "underlying mathematical patterns" in current hit songs and compares them to a new song to determine if it will become a hit or not. Looks like we can expect even more of the same old junk being recycled for us on the radio, although the article claims that it 'will allow new sounds and styles to flourish.'"
This works if you assume that a "new" or "different" song isn't likely to be a hit.
The media is already telling you what songs you will be listening to. Why would they need a computer to tell them what they already know?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
All I see this doing is allowing the RIAA to determine which songs should be invested in and which shouldn't be. Doesn't add to diversity because all it does is identify hits. If anything, it'll further homogenize corporate radio.
What'll be scary is when they use a modification of this to write top 40 hits, thereby taking people out of the mix entirely. I wonder, could the RIAA support such "musicians" when there is no real "artist" (I don't see them calling the people who wrote the code the artists, for some reason)?
By the way, this was posted over 24 hours ago on Fark. You'd think Slashdot would be a little faster on the updating.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
I am the reason the music industry is dying.
It couldn't possibly be the crap quotient that has gone up enormously over the last decade.
It seems like more then ever the music industry just sticks with whatever sells, experimenting with new sounds, who wants to take that risk?
Wow this thing will generate more of the same.
Quantifying tastes in music.
Evil.
Oh yeah, the problem with the music industry.
My bad.
> and how is this gonna change what's on the radio right now? They just play stuff until they find something that people like, which usually sucks
Actually, they just play whatever's written on the payola $$$, and people "like" it because they think everyone else does.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The songs that will be hits are the ones that get the most spins, whether it's because a local program director/music director got sweet-talked by a distribution rep (aka legal payola), or because Clear Channel says it'll be a hit. IAADJ.
Furthermore, MTV has a big part to play, still, because how many fat, bald guys do you see with hit records? Take hot chick, add dance background, have hit. For variety substitute a few decent-looking boys for the hot chick.
As for this program, remember, the nutrimat in the Heart of Gold also determined Arthur Dent would like the Advanced Tea Substitute. See what happens if he drinks it too much.....
If this program works like they say it does, then this could be the final nail in the coffin for the radio. If they made popular music MORE cut and paste, it'd just be some time before more people just quit listening.
Most new music is already cut and paste, and it's bad enough as it is.
If something like this had been in place for the past 30 years, there'd have been no innovation in music, and the music industry would be consolidated into one terrible company emitting pure crap, instead of the 5 or so major labels which emit mostly crap...
> An NPR article a few years ago reported how music companies decide which Country Music songs will be played on the radio.
Curiously, most of the "country" music that I hear on the radio these days sounds just like the second rate rock music of the 1970s, except for the addition of a handful of specific vocal mannerisms and an optional violin or steel guitar.
> Pop is probably done the exact same way. I guess that's why when you listen to "Classic hits of the [6-9]0s" you hear the same tripe over and again.
I think the "classic rock" format farted its brain out when they started having those "500 best of all time" weekends, where everyone could send in their votes for best song. They apparently used the results of those votes to prune their play lists to the sure winners. When the format first started they played a lot of interesting B-sides, album tracks, and other stuff that never made the top 40, but after a few years it got to where you could set your watch by which Pink Floyd or Bob Seeger tune they were playing.
About half my CDs are "classic rock", but I haven't listened to one of those stations in years. The damn "oldies" stations play a better selection of 60s music than the "classic rock" stations do.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think this kind of system, while it may very well do good for promoting songs that have similar qualities to existing 'popular' ones, would eventually bring up flaws if relied on too heavily, from the feedback loop it would have to generate. A few wildly popular songs would define what's released/promoted in the future. Those promotions, themselves only selected due to the use of an artificial construct, would then define what follows. I think some pretty icky patterns could start to reveal themselves.
2005: a little known new zealand band is suddenly promoted beyond belief. In most respects they're identical to the spice girls, they just happen to sound like New Kids On The Block, and their lead singer is named "Michael Jackson"
I'm running scared already.
From the way progressions resolve to the overused arrangement of "Intro Verse Chorus Bridge Verse Chorus Bridge Verse Breakdown Verse Chorus Outro", most popular music has the same basic structure. Why is it that 95% of rock songs have the same 4 chord major progression? IT WORKS! Yes, there are exceptions where real song writing ability carries the song on to success (Queen, anyone?) but the general templates are there...and record companies KNOW (and bank) on it. (considering that most pop buyers can only hear the singing, I'll understand if no one gets this)
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Call me naive, but aren't they supposed to be experts in picking hit songs already, and if a computer program can do the job what the hell are they being paid to do?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...this is pretty similar to the computer program described in The Jazz by Melissa Scott. A kid stumbles onto a program that can tell him how similar something is to existing works. It goes slightly further - making suggestions also - but the idea is the same. In the book, a major studio uses it for movies.
it's about the artistes... Why the hell else stupid shows like American Idol and Popstars (Bardot who?) become so popular?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
- it'll be consistent over long periods of listening
Humans are fickle. Humans are subject to boredom and whims. Consider this, if this program had been fed a steady stream of Paul Anka and Connie Francis hits, would it have predicted the Beatles chart toppers? I don't think so.An artist puts something of himself or herself into the work. It conveys emotions and ideas. There may be science in music, but there's no science behind what makes a song good or enjoyable.
When this algorithm can understand and reproduce the genius of the Beatles I will be impressed. recognizing tripe is still tripe. Creating tripe is still tripe. Write Yesterday, or In My Life and only then will I retire as a musician.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
"underlying mathematical patterns"
I wouldn't have a problem with that, if they were judging each song independently. Like it or not, music DOES revolve around math. Beat, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, and Tone are all by definition the elements that make something into music instead of just a bunch of noise.
Today MANY musicians make what is by definition closer to noise than music, because it only has some of these elements. A dripping faucet can have a beat and rhythmn, but it doesn't have a melody.
A lot of top-40 crap is manufactured garbage that is hollow and uninspired, but on the other hand it follows all of the rules of music and thus isn't exactly horrible to listen to (share and enjoy.)
On the other hand, a lot of VERY POPULAR singers completely disregard some of the most basic rules of music. (Did beat go out of style while I was off on another planet or is the entire population of the world go retarded while I was gone?)
A simple test for the quality of music is to compare it to all of the basic elements and see how much of each it has, and how well each one has done.
You can take a lot of music and quickly notice that the singer can not in tune, is off beat, isn't in harmony with the music, the music behind the singer's voice has no real melody (it's just a baseline - a common violation these days), or (very often) it's several of these things.
Again, much top 40 follows the rules. I'd rather hear that than some indi band that doesn't. Much of the top 40 doesn't, and I can do without those. Essentially I'll listen to anything well done, regardless of the type of music or whether or not it's "popular". I can even enjoy classical.
So if someone were to write a program that could simply screen out the "noise" and keep it from getting put on the charts, I don't think that would be a bad thing. Top 40 might not instantly stop being shit, but at least it would be musical shit, and not just a bunch of noise.
You're either going to agree with me on this, or flame me to death. What the hell, I have Karma to burn.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Take a peak at who wrote her songs... and then take a peak at which other acts he has produced...
It doesn't take some dumb machine to sell tons of CDs to the masses, it takes a few guys with insight into what would appeal to the masses, and then you find people who look right.
I seriously don't think that the machine would fix me up with music I like, because the parameters would be all skewed towards the drooling idiots that are the masses. No wonder I don't buy CDs anymore, I rather put my money elsewhere thank you very much.
You'd have to know more about how the system works to tell. It's very well possible that those songs share some mathematical similarities with other less original hit songs. Statistical methods can find rather deep hidden similarities even in superficially dissimilar things.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
1. I'm pretty sure that the program is some variety of snake oil. Whether it's an interesting AI project that might sometimes work or a pure fraud remains to be seen.
2. This won't change anything, even if it works. The major labels already use focus groups and mixing factories to make sure every piece of music they release is bland. (Why? Because recording has gotten too expensive, so they need to make every release a "sure thing", so they spend millions on focus groups and big-name mixers.) This program, even if it works, can't possibly make things worse.
Surely it's the marketing and not the tune which makes a hit. If a company can get a single into the top 10 (Not too hard with sales fixing etc.) then they will start to make real sales.
It's the popularity of a song that makes it popular, not the music. When was the last time you heard a mainstream DJ say "This song is great. It's got strong African rhythms mixed with Celtic melancholy." Or how about "This song is great. It's got the gothic movements mixed with C&W lyrics". Now, how about "This song is great. It came in at number one"...
People aren't interested in hearing music. We're interested in hearing what other people are hearing.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
The predictions made in 1984 were right. George Orwell just got it a few decades out.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Who was the big winner? Was it some teen sex idol? No. It was the daughter of a sitar player.
if you had access to the program, and you fed it the songs that were your own personal hits, maybe rated them, it would be better than just about anything else at telling you what else you'd like. Finding you bands you'd never heard of that were actually pretty good. It could allow you to expand your musical horizons rather than forcing you into the narrow spam mold of the cold musical marketing machine. It could easily evolve into a simple web based tool to sell more and a broader variety of music, but they'd never even think of it.
Sure music is mathematical, but you get completely different music from a computer or machine making the music (player piano, etc.) and somebody actually performing it. The person is able to put expression and feelings in the their work. Often the actual words sung are important to give the right expression and emotion.
Can a computer program really translate the meaning of the words sung and see if they are able to capture people emotionally?
Furthermore, when recording a song, there might be a lot of 'takes' to get a good song. Some are obviously better than others to the human ear, but I would be curious if this computer program rates these fairly or the same.
Live recording CDs change songs quite a bit also. When I play song, I try and change it a little each time, because it is a whole new experience. It keeps the audience interested because even if they have heard it before, they have not heard it quite the way I play it that time. The point is, little variations give a song the cutting edge to make it better. I know I have an album by the same band, but two different producers (Sponge - one by Chaos, the other by Work). One version is definately better than the other even though they are the same songs.
It is sort of the same for a song that was orginally lots of electric guitars and they re-did it all acoustic. Sometimes I even didn't like the electric and loved the acoustic. Can a computer program handle these extreme differences? I wouldn't think so.
If you can get ahold of the algorithms that are used to rate the music, you can then compose music that will make the record execs pee their pants with excitement. "Whoa, your song went up to eleven!"
We've already seen this happen -- build a spam filter and the spammers will then engineer their spam to get around it...
If I were a record exec, I'd be particularly dubious of this.
Sean
Don't take this as me sticking up for a pop star. She's cute in an odd sort of way, but I definitely don't like the music. I'm more of a Blue Oyster Cult/Led Zeppelin kind of guy, crossing over to power/progressive metal as of late. Actually now that I think about it, the current batch of pop girls (Avril, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton) are the most attractive group I can remember.
:)
But I have to stick up for her on a few points. Having heard two songs I think I could say that the lyrics don't seem to fit the genre of music. I read a slightly better interview of her in Newsweek a few months back, and I seem to recall she said something similar to what the previous poster had mentioned, that she focused on the lyrics and the label had used a lot of influence over the music on the first album. You can't really fault someone for saying "um" or "like" a lot in an interview because it is on the fly and most of us aren't practiced in rhetoric, don't take our time, and stutter all over the language in that situation. Also, when you're in a multiplatinum position, you probably don't want to talk about what the next album is going to be like if you don't know yet. I could forgive a lot saying she just came out of a huge album and tour, I don't blame her for being a bit exhausted and not really wanting to think about the next album right away. Particularly when you get asked it a lot and are going through the harrowing new star thing.
That said, my interpretation of the whole Avril thing is this: she was on the path to being one of their born 'n' bred country pop sensations. She for whatever reason came out differently than they expected. At 15, her "rebellion" probably didn't consist of walked into the CEO's office and terminating the contract over musical differences. Did anyone notice how mention of her parents is curiously missing from these interviews? My guess is that she told her parents she wasn't going to do it anymore. They went in and told the label, who came up with a "compromise." She could do "whatever she wanted"--as long as she followed along with what they wanted in the areas that didn't have to do with the music. Since she really didn't know a damn thing about music other than pop, it's what her first album sounds like. It's what she knew. Of course the rebellion didn't have anything to do with musical differences, she just didn't want to become a primped and preened mass media sex object.
Predictably, the label saw this as an excellent chance to make her a mass media sex object, only aiming her for the so-called angst-filled teenager market rather than the popular pop market. The uproar over this now seems really no different than the uproar that followed the release of American Pie or Something About Mary, except it's music and it's several orders of magnitude more benign. In actual fact, every teenager has angst, so her demographic is huge. Britney can't exactly convey the angst message, plus she suffered from over exposure. (I'd argue that pop is an inherently limited media that prevents more complex messages than simple teenage love/angst from being transmitted in the first place, but that's another rant.)
I bet they gave her all the freedom she could think of, and then just shuffled her off to do their photo shoots and various other PR without making a big deal about it. Being completely unworldly, she doesn't know 1) what she's rebelling against, or 2) what is intrinsic to the music business that she should be rebelling against, and isn't.
If my theory is correct, here's what I would expect to happen in the upcoming years:
1. Each successive album she creates is more of a departure from the first album until she finds her style (probably 2 albums from now).
2. Her fanbase grows smaller but more dedicated until she is taken seriously as a "real artist" in some circles. Along with that, it will be acknowledged that she has her own style, even if it's representative of some genre, but that genre will not be pop.
3. The label eventually drops her, inspite of which she continues to release albums on a smaller label and fill medium-sized venues well into her old age.
Is it likely? No. But the fact that her bass player left because he was tired of being a "marketing tool" might merely mean he is too talented to be wasted playing second fiddle for a clueless teenage girl who gets all the time in the spotlight. (It's not real likely he's talented either, but this is the music industry not the software industry). But here's what I expect would happen if she is nothing more than a marketing trick:
1. There are 2 additional albums from her, neither showing any marked improvement in skill in terms of songwriting or lyrics (or even any additional maturity or increase in vocabulary).
2. Each successive album cover shows her revealing more skin (in the other scenario, album covers are less likely to feature her prominently).
3. After the third album is a complete failure, the label drops her and she is never heard from again in any capacity. 20 years later, on VH1, we learn that she spent half her money moving to India where she teaches English and Computer Science in a middle school and is a devout Hindu. Or, alternately, she becomes an MTV anchorwench, which I think is at the same level of general interest and importance.
Of course, I could be wrong.
--
Daniel
> Rivers uses a mathematical formula when writing
...and on and on
> his songs based on songs by several bands
> including Nirvana. As a huge Weezer fan, I'd have
> to say he's on to something.
Most popular music is almost totally based on formulas e.g.:
- 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, repeat till end
- verse/chorus/verse/chorus/mid 8/chorus
- use I, IV, V, IIm, VIm chords
- sad verses, upbeat choruses (Bruce Springsteen loves this one!)
- something around 120 beats per minute is what gets people tapping their feet in time with the music, even if they're not actually consciously listening to it
- various instruments have their frequency ranges compressed in certain ways; this is what frequently separates the good/big-selling producers from the bad/not-so-big. Listen to multiple albums from the one producer, even across several different artists or styles of music, and you'll pick up the "brand" of specific producers in how they mix specific instruments in the audio spectrum.
Although I'm nowhere near up with state of the art, I'd be surprised if current sound analysis software couldn't detect most/all of the above and spit out some sort of number saying how well a song fits the above "rules".
Finally, if there's any doubt that these formulas exist, check the early 80s bubblegum Brit Pop stuff produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. You could remove the vocals, and what's left of the songs are almost interchangeable.
There is a great saying that I love that I've heard credited to David Cronenberg (never been able to verify it). The saying goes, "An entertainer gives you what you want. An artist gives you what you didn't realize you wanted."
This kind of hit-finding software will give music execs the abillity to perfect their entertainment while pushing them almost entirely away from art. For real artists out there, this could be a good thing, in the long-run.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Actually the generation gap is shrinking all the time. Our kids might be listening to the same music we are in 30 years.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
One of the problems is that everyone moans about the homogeneity and lack of good music and then instead of going out and buying it they download MP3s fromthe web. Now that is fine *providing* you give something back to the artists and the musicians writing the stuff... sadly this is often not the way...
The majority of buyers of music are in the young teeny market or the older back catalogue and new music is squeezed between these two camps. And hey guess what, most people into new music don't buy, my record label (LOCA sells very small amounts of CDs and Vinyl *even though* we get emails and good press telling us how good the music is.
And we have had a donate to artists for their MP3s available for twelve months and ONLY ONE PERSON HAS DONE SO... even though we have had thousands of downloads.
Now, perhaps everyone hates the music - fair enough - but I think much more likely people can't get their head around paying for something they have already got on their walkman. That is certainly one of the main reasons I do not copy albums off people, the moment I do, no matter how good my intentions, I do not go and buy the CD. Sure if I grab an MP3 off the web I will as then the quality is poor (for instance I recently went out and got the Electric6 single Danger! High Voltage! after a download).
So what do we the tiny independent labels do about this? Well I'm truly not sure.. The market is sewn up by the majors to extents you would not believe. Generally people *do not like* buying unknown bands, and certainly not if they are not stocked in the major record stores, and lastly if they get the MP3 they seem mostly happy with that...
I would love for an alternative business model to start to emerge on the web but it seems that for all the talk its the same everywhere, the majors can advertise and buy their way into the web review sites by blitzing them with promos, they plug like crazy and they already control the external print market. Goodby heterogeneity, hello homogeneity.
This new 'scientific' method of calculating music singles is the result of laziness and shallowness by the buying public and quite frankly history will judge us that way...
But not too get too depressing, will that stop us writing music and running the label? Nah.. we love music too much..
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
It's been around for years and I've always called it "cookie cutter" music.
No originality, every song sounds just like the last song, and boring as hell.
Somebody takes a recipe, gets the required ingredients, and bakes a shitty song.
The trouble is that a lot of people don't have any taste when it comes to music, and they buy whatever is hyped the most just so they will look "cool" or "with it". No surprise that most dance and pop music falls into this category.
Top 40 means the top 10 songs played 40 times a day. Aaarrrrrrgggghhh!
Goodbye, Mr. Rogers. We'll miss you.
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Sounds like a recipe for food poisoning.