Slashdot Mirror
Decoding the Algorithm for Pop Music
fb4f writes "Over at Modplug, they have an article describing a mathematical algorithm to predict if a given song will become a hit or not. Paraphrasing the article, a Spanish company called Polyphonic HMI has made a business out of analyzing song submissions and predicting their "hitability". Here's their description of the algorithm and here's their FAQ. They claim to have predicted the commercial success of Norah Jones through this method. Here's my question (which is not fully answered in their FAQ): if they (music company executives) are currently using the algorithm to screen submissions for their "hitability", can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality? I for one, still like the fresh talent and community feel of the tracking scene."
Can anyone predict what pop-culture wants?
There is no replacement for displacement.
Someone should make an algo to calculate which Slashdot comments will be moderated up to 5. Should be pretty easy...as long as you bash SCO!
If Singer.Belly.isShown() then mod.singer.+1sexy
If Singer.Voice.isScreaming() then mod.singer.+1punkfav
If Singer.Gender.isMale() then mod.singer.+1prepubescentgirls
If Singer.Label.isRIAA() then mod.singer.+1popular
If Singer.Style.isOriginal() then mod.singer.-1original
Us deciding what is good or the music industry telling us what is good?
This company's stuff doesn't do much good when society is bombarded by what the industry wants us to hear.
It becomes a hit because we don't get much of a choice. ClearChannel plays no variety, the non conclomorate channels don't play variety but instead endlessly repeat that they are not owned by ClearChannel and Infinity...
The only way hits can be decided is through freedom of music.
Support those artists that support the free distribution, copying, and playing of their music. Start your searchs at Sharing the Groove and FuthurNET
When will they make an algorithm that tells me a singer's hitability, so I know which pages of Maxim to skip?
I wonder if they've tested it against *other* music than crap as well...
If Autechre or Pan Sonic came out with extra hitability I guess there'd be a quite few people looking shocked and/or running for the hills... *eg*
np: Autechre - Gantz Graf (Gantz Graf EP)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
There has been something similiar about 2 or 3 years ago. However: I didn't believe it's success back then, and I don't believe it today.
Well, I don't know how to tell what songs will be popular. But, obviously, this topic is popular.
So ask them why a single song can be hated and loved by different people? Which guy falls into the "right" answer? In fact, this algo is just BS
Who?
40% Action
30% Comedy
30% Romance
0% Madonna
( with credit to Jay Leno )
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
it's easy to do fourier analysis and find commonalities between a bunch of songs that all sound the SAME.
and i agree with the person who posted above... the "tracking scene" ? techno is great and all, but somebody needs to give the trackers a copy of digital performer and a microphone.
They claim to have predicted the commercial success of Norah Jones through this method.
Am I the only one wondering who the hell Norah Jones is?
You damn kids and your pop music. I think I'm going to have to dodder out on the porch and yell at the neighbors' kids for playing on my lawn.
--saint
"Here's my question (which is not fully answered in their FAQ): if they (music company executives) are currently using the algorithm to screen submissions for their "hitability", can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality?"
And here's my question: can we use this algorithm to create the hit, instead of determining wether or not it's gonna be a hit?
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Its strangely insightful. I hate bland manufacturised pop music. It's music for the sheeple. I prefer real music from real bands, like Limp Bizkit and Korn and shit like that. Music for us truely individual people who are outcast from society for daring to be different, for refusing to conform, for sticking a finger up to The Man.
Mapping the higher order functions (if there are any) of the teenage and prepubescent female brain is nigh impossible.
On the other hand, predicting what will be popular might be very easy.
Next big pop hit = whatever the record companies tell them it will be.
Witness the last American Idol. Who did the sheeple choose? The large black guy, Rueben. Months later, who do you hear the most about? The Howdy Doody lookalike who came in second place, Clay.
"you vill like vhat ve vant, not what you vant!"
AFAIK, this isn't new. This technique has been in use for years, at least theoretically.
IIRC, this was first tested on random samplings of classical music. Beethoven and Mozart scored significantly better that others.
Quote : " What do big hits typically score? As stated above we tend to use 7.00 and higher as a score for a hit song because that's where they tend to score. There have been hits that score a little lower but the promotion has tended to be more aggressive. Some big hits score very low on the HSS scale but more than make up for that low score in other aspects of analyses that a label can do on your music with us if you happen to be negotiating a deal. ".
It sound like "we found some correlation, but there is data outside the correlation, and sometimes downright anti-correlation between reality and prediction". I think without looking at the data and the real corelation coeficient between "predicting it will be a hit" and "it was a hit" it is difficult to say anything. And even then, correlation between data does not mean there is causal relation, although *pleasing* to the ear is certainly why we hear at music. I think this kleave other factor out. For example the signification of the lyrics. You ear Mozart uniquely for the pure sound pleasantness, but you do not ear some of the rock/pop for its sound only (try it, many of the greatest hit sound "bland" without their lyric).
Plus even if they try to "reassure" customer in their FAQ, if you comapre things to the past and try to reproduce what has the best functionned in the past, then you will never innovate. Which is IMO the biggest problem now (and it feels that new bands/singer are solely choosen on their look, given prefabricated lyric and tune, and marketed as prima dona, instead of having bands/singer raise on their own by the sheer beauty of their music).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
People don't want origionality, they don't want something new.
Occassionally there is a blip and people get excited about something. But mostly they are content to wander through life with a catchy tune in their hollow little heads.
So wait a minute.
The algorithm uses the top 30 songs of the last five years as its base of comparison. It then analyzes thousands of songs and determines which ones are most likely to be hits, and those that score best are selectively fed into the market. These songs by necessity become the next set of top 30 hits, and are again used as the algorithm's base of comparison.
So basically, the basis of the system is "these songs will be hits because I say they'll be hits, and I say they'll be hits because they sound like songs that I said would be hits." Isn't this a really, really bad (read: dangerous) case of circular logic?
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
It's designed to be a tool for them to protect themselves from mistakes.
...And the endless variations of the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block?
"Well, it bombed in the market, but the software algorithm said it had a chance. I did what the software said was right."
It's your run-of-the-mill corporate bullshit. No creativity, and no real courage to try something different and take a risk.
How do you think we got Milli Vanilli?
The music industry as it is, is little more than a middle-man. Cut them out of the picture, and the consumers benefit, and the REAL artists do too!
They claim to have predicted the commercial success of Norah Jones through this method.
Who the fuck is Norah Jones? Commercial success and I've never heard the name before today.
Popularity = k . MarketingBudget
The more they hype it, the more the buying public (increasingly younger teenagers, I wait for the day they get to "pocket-money" kids who simply can't afford it - the industry will implode) will cough up....
Simon the cynic.
Physicists get Hadrons!
(x>11)->sexist
ClrHome
Menu("Pop Machine","Hybrid Genre + Classical Soundtrack",1,"CopyCat Band",2)
Lbl 1
Disp "Genre 1"
Prompt A
Disp "Genre 2"
Prompt B
Output "New artist is," A+B ",with a flair of Beethoven."
Lbl 2
Disp "Current Hotties"
Prompt H
Disp "Number of artists in your group"
Prompt N
If H = bandname.acronym
Then
Output N("th")("nd")("rd") + Random.Constellation.Name
Else
Output first.letters
End
Someone that have the program, send me a email. I want to run my favorite mp3s through it and see what it thinks about them :)
Okay, so far, so good; it sounds like they're saying "good music is good music, and here's a tool for telling whether something is good or not." I'm still skeptical at this point, but it's certainly an interesting idea, and one worthy of study.
But then they completely lose me with this one:
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
They make a high-flown reference to the 36 Plots and other serious attempts at artistic analysis, but that's not what they're actually doing. I do believe that good music is good music, good stories are good stories, etc. I can at least consider seriously the hypothesis that all good art has certain qualities in common, and that by analyzing those qualities we can evaluate a new work's chance of lasting success. But the idea that musicians (or writers, or whatever) can keep pumping out stuff exactly like What's Hot Now and be guaranteed a blockbuster is just stupid.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The Manual - how to have a number one - the easy way.
Written by the Timelords (the KLF)
(i know, this is a bit offtopic, but hey!, why not?)
"I for one, still like the fresh talent and community feel of the tracking scene."
And I, for one, long for the return to the simplicity and elegance of railway travel.
~jeff
Who is Norah Jones? What kind of a hitter is that singer if noone ever heard of him/her?
Autechre where trendy amongst the beard-strokers last year, you serial rapist. Keep up or fuck off!
There should be a constant for that, I mean this is pop music. How many guys in the bar when chilling after a long day of slinging code comment on how nice Britney's voice is and her complete understanding of music and musical theory...and how many talk about her nice tits and fine ass as well as how hot she is.
Sexual appeal is a huge cornerstone for Pop, and a major factor in it's success.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Why not? Why can't some guy with a tracker create an original tune?
I mean, sure, it won't be as "high-quality" as a tune coming out of an expensive studio, but it can still be original.
Or is original a bugbear word with little meaning? Think about it.
Why are you so gay?
A few years ago I saw an interview of a "composer" (forgot his name). They're guys who are somewhat famous because their name is in a lot of albums, but in very small print: they compose the actual music that the band plays. This is standard practice, apparently.
Anyway the point is that the guy pointed out that most pop tunes were rehashes of older pop hits. Maybe you create a different style with different instruments or beat, but the underlying melody is the same. He then showed some examples, in how some modern R&B titles were lifted off some older Rock titles. It's not that hard to believe though, look at how Puff Daddy makes a living out of talking fast over music of old hits.
So in short, one way to predict if a music will be a hit is by creating a database of previous hits and test the correlation...
[and then of course, there's those who say that Classical music tried every combination possible, so nothing can be new afterwards - but that's maybe a little extreme].
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Not that I'm surprised by what anyone wearing one glove and singing "Beat It" would do...
The article states:
"This software will compare the song to a database that contains the "top-30" hit songs of the past five years in order to search for mathematical similarities. The algorithm then assigns each song a score between one and 10. Any song rated more than seven is likely to become a hit."
Now think about this.. use musical eras like the 80's and early 90's as an example because it's reasonably safe to assume this technology didn't exist at that point.
Look at the charts in 5 year chunks, it all sounds the same. In the 80's, everyone either used a synthesizer or had a raging, face-melting solo at some point in the song. Or the early 90's, "grunge" was being pounded into our head incessantly.
It was like that because it was popular. Band X makes it big, and suddenly Bands X1 through X255 appear on the charts mimicing this sound. This seems to happen in, amazingly enough, cycles of 5 years.
Seems to me this software does nothing to show the "hitability" of a song, but rather telling you whether or not it sounds just like what's currently popular, and has been for the past couple years.
Seems about as magical to me as as an algrorythm claiming it can detect boys that like looking at porn.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
It's not so much that the algorithim can determine that the song will be a hit, it's that the algorithim picks a song apart and lumps it with similar songs - whether the similar songs were or are hits is what determines whether a given specimen will make it onto the Billboard charts.
This sig no verb.
I really hate to even remotely sound like I'm going to defend the music industry, but: Why don't you decide for YOURSELF without any help from your peers or technology as to the merits of the music? All music is just noise unless it is appreciated by a human being. Think for yourself, and don't let the media industry, your friends, your government, or anyone tell you who you are ever again.
I admit that using an algorithm to determine whether a song gets air time or not is a pretty sucky way to do business, but no one is forcing you to listen to a "Clear Channel" type station in the first place.
And I, for one, welcome our new tracking overlords.
I'm not talking about the theoretical possibility of them creating original music -- my point is that most of the music from that scene is very unoriginal and of particularly poor quality.
Aren't the mainstream pop music composers already using algorithms to make each song ? It surely sounds like they do !
I bet one could make a program that takes say 20 samples , indicate which one is supposed to be the drums, etc, and and have the program compose the song.
Maybe it could compose the chant melody by recognizing actual chords in the samples, and applying known hamonic rules to end up with a melody to put on top of it...
In fact I suppose some midi softs are already capable of doing scuh things.
All this mainstream crap is sooo predictible it makes me sick (I mean one could write down the totality of one of those songs just by listening to the first 20 seconds... Which is not the case with real music)
Stop flirting with me, please.
My (somewhat vague) recollection is that Kurt Vonnegut's (originally rejected) PhD thesis looked at the plot lines of many books, using the X axis as time and the Y axis as good fortume or bad fortune for the principle character. It turned out that there were only a few graphs that led to best-sellers; any books that tried a different tack were not popular. (Except possibly for Shakespeare; Vonnegut mentioned that he could never figure out what was good- or bad-fortune in a Shakespeare play).
It may simply be that certain things are hard-wired into us, and these criteria must be met for a majority of us to enjoy a literary, musical, or other creative work.
This does not rule out creativity. For example, most everyone inherently loves a 12-bar blues tune, so basing a new song on this is not a bad idea. But the Beatles could do much different things within this "limitation" than could Robert Johnson or The Clash. All were very creative, but many of there songs had commonality.
"Nu-metal is great for 12-year-olds who want to be individual together."
Jacko used to play a "rubba rubba"-game with his little boyfriend.
If you want to reject empty, valueless music, why not listen with a critical ear and pay attention. Why do you need a computer to tell you what you like?
Those of us who were listening to pop music during the 60s enjoyed continuous creativity from many different directions, all going directly into widely popular stuff. Then the music marketing business got its formulas - its algorithms - together in the early 70s and there hasn't been a similar sustained wave of pop culture creativity since. The difference in the 60s, in large part, was that the record companies had seen their old formulas largely stop working about when the 60s began, and so were left to their resourcefulness in finding good stuff beyond their former formulaic sensibilities. By the time the 70s came, a younger generation of music executives had come in who could distill formulas from the prior decade of experience and render rock-based pop largely morbid, as swing-based pop tunes had become by the 50s.
Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this). If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?
Much of the best of 60s pop music was haunted and quirky. That's what happens when the creative is in the lead, rather than the formulaic. Compare the Elizabethan stage. Human expression triumphs when the formulas, while still there for reference, cease to have a stranglehold over production.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Why can't some guy with a tracker create an original tune?
There are things that can easily be done with a live performance that can't readily be done with MID, MOD, S3M, XM, or even IT, such as vocals and electric guitar effects.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've long thought that the reason that I disliked most of what passed as ``popular'' music was that it was too formulaic. I used to think it was just ``herd think'' by music industry executives but now it turns out that they've just been following a recipe and these guys just reverse engineered it.
How long before I can get a box that I can connect to the stereo that displays the level of adherence to The Formula so I can get a visual indication of why I dislike a certain song and can change the station. Oops! Bad idea. The indicator would pretty much peg whenever I had a commercial radio station selected.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Why are you alienated by the fact that your brain works in a predictable manner? This is nothing new - the formulae for "beautiful women" has been known for years. This is just one more step in the process of understanding how we work. I guess we will see more and more of this - in a few years we will probably see computers improving food recipies, making whisky and designing clothes.
And I, for one, welcome our new welcoming our new overlords overlords
From the article.
In a retail environment, both the "more like this" and the "music taste test" can be efficiently presented on in-store terminals, or on a retail website. The same technique could be applied to many other situations, such as automatically recommending songs from a personal collection as a playlist, or anywhere that commonalities between pieces of music can be useful.
Now, call me a cynic but i see a very high possibility for corruption in the retail market. When the public gets a taste for their product, the recording industry can just use it for more marketing. All they have to do is insert what they want the public to think is going to be "the next big thing" and someone will bite, causing a trend. Maybe I should find my tinfoil hat?
Sig not found.
You've obviously never been to a live show where people use tracker music as a part of it. I've been to them. It's possible. For instance: Impulse Tracker allows you to press a button to continue down the tracks of a song, line by line, at your own pace; I've had friends use that as a way to mix in tracker music with more live instrumentation...
For those of you looking for a more "classic" collection of Tracker Music (when there was a more cohesive tracker scene, hq'd on IRC in the channel #trax, and when the demo scene was all Amiga and DOS-based and was truly creative), check out The Hornet Archive.
And I don't know about you guys, but tracker music has some of the MOST original music I've ever heard, much of it is so different from what I've heard elsewhere that unless the tracking scene really picks up and becomes more like it was 7-10 years ago, I doubt we'll ever get a chance to hear the variety of music like what was coming out of that scene again anytime soon. Just search for music by "Dizzy", for instance.
So they have predicted the success of Norah Jones (whoever she is), but how many false positives have they identified too ? How many hits have they missed ?
If you only report your successes, but not your failures, your "science" is gonna look much better than it really is, until someone comes along and check all your results. Of course, if you can patent your "science" and make it unavailable for scrutiny, then you may continue with the BS.
The real question IMO is why there is the word "science" in there. Can anybody say "cargo cult" ?
lone, dfx.
No longer are the artists needed, it's just to generate some random noice, check it with the algorythm and see if it will be a hit or not.
:)
Perfect!
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
Saw this on TLC/Discovery a while back. Basically, what they found were that popular music generally were grouped together like star constellations. So what you had were good music grouping together.
/. suggests finding original music through this method. I don't know, but anyone who bases their reason for liking music on the originality factor doesn't really have musical tastes, IMO. If you like a song, what's wrong with just liking it? Song's don't have to have a completely original sound to be good, they just have to be good.
Indeed, original music isn't necessarily good. But what was interesting was that in the report, they talked about all the different genres, and even older music, like classical, held true to grouping.
And even music in the same category, like two Pop songs, weren't always in the same grouping.
On another note: the
Jason Lotito
In all the history of human been, art has been unpredictable, ilegal, persecuted, and there always was a differente "art". The drug for the masses, kind of art. Lately, and i mean, in the last 40 years, art has become fordist. It's produced in-line, copyrighted, and puted into market. They have finally discovered that if human been has little or no culture, if he's restricted to some kind of knowledge, limited, only usefull to do an especific job, to have a very determinated role in society, then, he's easier to dominate, to manipulate him.
... it is.
TV, Pseudo-Music and other kinds of pseudo-art, pseudo-sports that are watched on tv instead of played, selfhelp "literature", CNN, etc,etc,etc.
Sounds like Matrix ha???. Well
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
In true Slashdot fashion, I haven't read the article.
That said, if I were going to write something to analyze it - I would break the music down with a FFT and then run that through Bayesian analysis.
You could technically even use that then to generate new songs that are based on the existing popular ones.
The problem with that technique is that it doesn't account for new music - it just "assumes" (not that there is any real thought involved) that what is popular now is what will remain popular.
The issue that needs to be addressed is that our tastes fatigue over time and exposure, so something that is popular now will get played to death and then eventually there will be a rebellion in tastes and a new cycle will begin.
This was seen in the switch from the hair metal of Poison to the flannel rock of Nirvana.
That said, it is all cycles, and it is just a matter of how fast the cycles are turning over and what current influences have led to the current cycle (disco died and then eventually came back slightly tougher as techno, which then evolved on into industrial, trance, and other sub components).
In the end, there are outside influences that are harder to account for in an algorithm, and it might very well work better to use humans as more efficient algorithm analysis (unconsciously in their head via what they like and dislike).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I for one welcome our new robotic song analyists and suggest that they need someone of my talents to show their works to the people and make sure the entire world cringes before their might.
As everybody knows, in the current payola scheme, songs with three commas in their name get automatic airtime.
Litigious bastards
Anyway the point is that the guy pointed out that most pop tunes were rehashes of older pop hits.
And this is how the situation perpetuates itself. If somebody new to the scene comes in and tries to write an original song, he will undoubtedly get bit by an earworm of a song that was popular decades ago but is still copyrighted. Then the older song's publisher will sue the rookie.
Yes, it could happen, and yes, it did happen: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music .
and then of course, there's those who say that Classical music tried every combination possible
The established songwriters' counsel will do everything in their power to downplay this theory so that they can prevail in a copyright infringement case. The argument might go a little something like this: if the rookie has heard the established songwriter's song even once on the radio, and the two songs are "substantially similar," then the rookie has infringed copyright.
Apparently, the only way to avoid a lawsuit entirely is to cover songs from the public domain.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is no wonder that a hit can be determined by an algorithm. An algorithm has been used to create the hits in the first place.
So let me get this straight: if a song sounds like a current hit song, it may well be a hit song?
Any this is useful how?
They say they match parameters such as:
- Melody
- Harmony
- Chord progression
- Brilliance
- Fullness of sound
- Beat
- Tempo
- Rhythm
- Octave
- Pitch
This isn't "analysis", it's gross categorization (i.e.:"uptempo pop song in the Michael Bolton vocal style"). It's entirely subjective to the listener - what does "fullness of sound" mean, anyway?Even then, they add this huge disclaimer:
1. The song must be good from an A&R perspective. That is it must sound like a hit song to human ears.
2. It must have optimal mathematical patterns. (that's where this service comes in).
3. It must be promoted well and with an appropriate artist.
Feh. Nothing to see here. If you're interested in real algorithmic analysis, check out David Cope.
Personally, I listen to music I like. If I don't like it, I don't listen. If that means I happen to like the music of the latest "pop sensation", well, that's not a problem. So this idea of rejecting music that fits this profile? Not for me, and shame on you - if ya'all would just be true to what you like, then perhaps this whole thing would be less of a problem.
if (music == CRAP) riaa.wealth++; else riaa.wealth++;
no one is forcing you to listen to a "Clear Channel" type station in the first place.
How about every employer in fields where employees do not telecommute? If all the music stations that one's car can receive are owned by Clear Channel or another nationwide radio giant, what other choice is there to listen to while driving to and from work?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's my question (which is not fully answered in their FAQ): if they (music company executives) are currently using the algorithm to screen submissions for their "hitability", can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality?
Yes, we can. Unfortunately if it can detect "recycled tunes" it will probably be more likely to be used by the recording industry to sue artists for infinging on previous songs (and used in court as evidence).
Maybe it could compose the chant melody by recognizing actual chords in the samples, and applying known hamonic rules to end up with a melody to put on top of it
But because the space of pleasing music is so littered with copyrights, anybody who publishes such a song may get sued into oblivion. Believe me; I tried implementing algorithmic composition once, but I noticed bits and pieces of songs I knew to be copyrighted in its output, and who knows what other copyrights the program violated.
Along these lines, you may find this short story by Spider Robinson interesting.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Damn it's really simole:
Verse 1
Verse 2
Chours
Solo
Verse 3
Chorus
(Repeat chorus while fading out)
There. A top ten song...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
"Historically, what is pleasing to the human ear has not changed since man began writing music."
That's true in that music has probably had percussion since the start, other then that, total rubbish.
What about music from other cultures? Totally different scales, numbers of notes, structure, the works. You gonna tell a billion Indian's their taste in music is mathematically wrong?
Music is almost 100% relative. It's about painting a psycho acoustic picture inside the listener. Why do certain sounds feel aggressive, well others are soulful? It's 99% arbitrary.
Goodness, in a pop sense, is a matter of painting a picture a whole bunch of people perceive in a similar way. It's a function of civilization, just like any art.
The very thought that you can mathematically write pop songs. People have been trying for awhile. Even if you get an algorithm for a perfect pop song, everyone would get sick of that style and pop would reinvent itself. It's what happens. Hair metal gives way to Grunge. Grunge gives way to Big Beat, Big Beat gives way to nu metal, nu metal gives way to retro-punk. Hip hop does it all within one genera. Street goes to bling, bling goes to conscience, conscience goes to freestyle street and now we got Outkast doing some sort of 70s funk thing doing triple platinum.
The trick isn't writing songs, that's easy, the trick is writing the songs that work nearly universally.
Ask anybody who does it for a living.
There are things that can easily be done with a live performance that can't readily be done with MID, MOD, S3M, XM, or even IT, such as vocals and electric guitar effects.
Aha, so in order to be original, one has to use original never-before-used concepts, such as vocals and electric guitar effects. ;)
He fucked up by posting unpopular comments. This is Slashdot's way of keeping the groupthink firmly in place.
Did they include the size of the singer's boobs in their algorithm ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Wesley Willis figured out the algorithm for Rock & Roll Music a long time ago.
After listening to a lot of Wesley Willis mp3s, the Beach Boys start to sound very formulatic, complete with the exact same pattern: Verse Verse Solo Verse. Only without the chorus consisting of repeating the title 4 times.
Can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality?
So you allow the RIAA to determine your tastes in reverse?
(Shamelessly stolen from Youthtopia)
Repost: February story
Parent appears to link to child pornography [ pedophila paedophilia ].
Moderators???
Appears to work (or at least teach him a pattern)--Weezer's damn catchy.
Despite the poor method for determination of a hit song (comparison to Top 30 hits), this kind of endeavor brings up a number of interesting points. First, it is fairly difficult to deny that there exist patterns in the music that humans enjoy (across genres and cultures I would contend). Furthermore, these patterns arise from what humans find to be pleasant. This seems pretty obvious. Lyrics aside (a large component of music that is left alone by this method of scoring), humans enjoy music that they find pleasant in the sense that it feels good to listen, not in that it is an intellectually stimulating activity. This suggests a biochemical basis most likely residing in differential expression of neurotransmitters similar to a pleasure response, like sex perhaps. There is growing body of evidence to support such an assertion. An example of research into this subject finds that using a PET scan in relation to "chills" resulting from pleasurable experiences when listening to specific music shows that areas assoicated with reward and emotion are stimulated like the ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex (Blood AJ, Zatorre RJ. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 Sep 25;98(20):11818-23). Despite obvious problems with this method, it brings up important considerations when looking at music from a scientific perspective. However, it is worth noting that investigation of this type tends to act to diminish qualities of music we enjoy (spontaneity and innovation). Perhaps it is something that should be left alone by science and kept "human."
I used to complain about the recycling of musical ideas up until the point where I engaged in a serious study of the theory of harmony.
It turns out that there just aren't that many ways that you can assemble the harmonic building blocks of music (in mere structural terms, that is -- the treatment of the structure is where the real variety goes). What I mean is that we have to live with the cycle of fifths, and the strong progressions that happen between chords rooted on tones that are adjacent in the cycle. Why? Because the root tones of the chords in your "key" all happen to be adjacent along the circle, as are the remaining 5 out of 12 tones that are not in your key.
The I (roman numeral one) chord has the IV chord on one side, and the V chord on the other. There's your basis for rock and blues.
On the far side of the V chord (from the I) lies the ii chord (lower-case roman numeral, denoting a minor chord). There lies your basis for jazz: the ii V I progression.
And the longest, strongest progression that contains all of the diatonic chords: IV vii iii vi ii V I (473-6251). They're all in a line along the cycle of fiths, except between the 4 and the 7, where we hide the "seam" left by restricting ourselves to the diatonic tones.
And why restrict ourselves to the diatonic system? Well, it turns out that the diatonic major scale is unique in that it can be constructed by a simple algorithm, starting with one of the 12 tones (adding to the scale as you go) and proceeding up a perfect fifth (modulo 12) until there are no more gaps left that are larger than a "whole step" (two half-steps). This is a very special scale and it amazes me how early in human history it was discovered. It's no wonder the monks thought it was god's own scale.
And don't even get me started on the golden ratio as it appears in musical architecture.
Of course music gets recycled. Deal with it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I am suffering from the same problem with my secret "coin-tossing" algorithm. However, I'm sure with just a bit of tweaking, it'll be ready to include in my forthcoming StokPredicta+(TM) software, which I can advertise for free over the internet! Though if I can't get it working, I may need to use yours. I'll cut you in on some of the cash - don't worry about that!
It's already been invented, it's called the Bra Size.....
Whats that experiment? Shrodingers cat?
By observing the object, the object changes.
One example of this is the trillion dollar bet where the only way to protect against such misuse or stockmarket card counting, is to make it public where everyone uses it.
Something about making something untrue by making it public knowledge.
If such a algorythim is possible then it can be programmed into a music program to generate intellectual property...So to own all hits before they are.
Maybe we just need plugs in the back of our heads or our wallets...
the article's title made the riaa's head turn around and started thinking "lawsuit! LAWSUIT!"
The warden told me not to come around here
People in this joint really like my rear
The fire's in their thighs and they think I like it queer...
So beat me, just beat me
I try to run, I try to find my neverland
I like little kids but not this big bad man
I wanna be tough, I don't wanna be had
So beat me, but don't beat me too bad
Just beat me, beat me, beat me, beat me
Get ready cause I'm gonna repeat it
I have the dough to help the DA get it right
It doesn't matter who's wrong or who's right
Just beat me, beat me
Just beat me, beat me....
How can you afford your rock n' roll lifestyle?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
This sounds an awful lot lot like the versificator in 1984.. I swear, every day commercialism takes us one step closer to the stranglehold exercised by the state in that book.
Just because.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
TITLE OF THE SONG - DaVinci's Notebook
Declaration of my feelings for you
Elaboration on those feelings
Description of how long these feelings have existed
Belief that no one else could feel the same as I
Reminiscence of the pleasant times we've shared
And our relationship's perfection
Recounting of the steps that lead to our love's dissillusion
Mostly involving my unfaithfulness and lies
Penitent admission of wrongdoing
Discovery of the depth of my affection
Regret over the lateness of my epiphany
CHORUS:
Title of the song
Naive expression of love
Reluctance to accept that you are gone
Request to turn back time
And rectify my wrongs
Repetition of the title of the song
Enumeration of my various transgressive actions
Of insufficient motivation
Realization that these actions led to your departure
And my resultant lack of sleep and appetite
Renunciation of my past insensitive behavior
Promise of my reformation
Reassurance that you still are foremeost in my thoughts, now,
Need for instructions how to gain your trust again
Request for reconciliation
Listing of the numerouss tasks that I'd perform
Of physical and emotional compensation
CHORUS
Acknowledgement that I acted foolishly
Increasingly desparate pleas for your return
Sorrow for my infidelity
Vain hope that my sins are forgivable
Appeal for one more opportunity
Drop to my knees to elecit crowd response
Prayers to my chosen deity
Modulation and I hold a high note...
CHORUS
If anything, Reuben is an instance of the "magical black friend" phenomena (eg., like in the movie "What Dreams May Come"). America is past the point of being overtly racist in polite society. While some sense of "racism" still remains, much of it a matter of people preferring their own culture now.
It's quite wearisome to hear blacks being hyper-sensitive to racism. It's no less wearisome to hear whites saying things like "they will hire him because he's black/asian/hispanic" or "they will hire her because she's both female and black". Maybe there's some validity to each group's complaints, but America really needs to progress to new political discourse... solving problems like urban blight or the drug war will do more to help minorities and, in turn, all Americans.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
"if they (music company executives) are currently using the algorithm to screen submissions for their "hitability", can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality?"
/gripe
No. You don't have a say in this and you know it. Why ask? The industry is fueled by american teenagers. They aren't the wisest shoppers, nor the most picky. Give them a set of boobies to admire and some bling bling to think about and out come the $20's.
An example: Brittney Spear's popularity. 12 magazine covers and over 20 tv appearances this month alone. Who reading this actually buys her CDs? Probably not many, she's a manufactured star for highschool kids.
I do wish the sound of a 'band' would become popular again. It seems like ever since the alternative explosion in the early 90's every white-bread band has to sound the same. Can one male singer (not hiphop) NOT sing through his nose for a song or two? That, and the heroin voice (ie. Faith No More) is so damn overdone. What are we up to now? 5 or 6 top 40 bands that might as well have the same vocalist and guitarist? There must be some algorythm that picks up on this in the 'hitability' analysis.
This isn't anything new, I guess. It's like that Monkies tv show modelled after the Beatles. Except now, it's not a tv show and it's got a lot of re-runs.
welcome our emotional response predicting overlords.
Because in this case there is a causality , not the one you are choosing (darkness provok sun going down) but the other way sun going down provok darkness. In the example of what they give in the FAQ there may not even be a correlation or causality. And to have a prediction better than what the statistical random prediction would be then you have to have a causal relationship between the two. It might be complex it might be indirect transitive (a->b->->...->n) but it has to be tehre. Else you observe two variable which are not related.
I can remmember that the best example of statistic is where you take the strength of the tide and the number of cupware stuff bought over the last 10 years and find a high correlation or even a high predictability. But since the two are unrelated by causality, but even with an ultra precise measurement of the next tidal wave you cannot predict (for obvious reason) the next cupware sale better than a blind random draw.
And this is IMO the big point ehre. They might have found correlation , but I do not think they found causality. Proof is that when they try to predict the "hit" of the year 70-80 they consistently fail to predict anything.
if their algorithm was really foudned on what human like to ear then it would consistently find the same result whatever the epoche as they themselves point out in their own FAQ !!! I won't bother search back (page do not answer) but they said right at the starts that what human like is a constant that can be mathematically calculated.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As a younger listener, I was well aware of rap music, but it sort of cornered its own market and stayed there. I don't think anyone was prepared for, or could of predicted the massive influx of rap/hip-hop into the mainstream. Personally, it's not my bag of tea (little music is these days). And personally, I don't see what's so prolific about it, other than the fact that a good portion of it has a *very* raw, rebellious overtone that is, for whatever reason, favored by youth. But it's there, it has a huge market, and I find it interesting, if for no other reason than to admire the degree of influence it has had.
Given this, I'm not sure there is any algorithm that can predict what people will decide they like at any given point, as there are so many dynamics at work. As others have pointed out, there is definitely the chance that our music-buying preferences are being manipulated by those at the top telling us what we like. But there are also others - the infamous "what are my friends listening to" I-gotta-be-like-everyone-else mentality. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention another significant consideration, at least with respect to the most of the popular artists: Is there any money in it?
Just read the manual on how to get a #1 hit the easy way by The KLF.
It has been first published in 1988!
This gives a whole new meaning to the spelling error "algorhythm".
and the secret ingredient is...love?!? why you stupid algorithm!
if the artist who recorded the song looks good on a pepsi can, the song is a pop hit
This is totally incomplete because it omits 90% of what makes a pop artist a hit. It's all about the dancing, attititude, self-groping, clothing, and sex-appeal.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
War is Peace (IE: Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.)
Freedom is Slavery (IE: ever-growing government taxation)
Diversity is Strength (IE: politicians cash in on ethnic politics and slave labor via illegal immigration. "Only a biggot and a hater could disagree.")
Is it safe to say that Lawrence Welk was also a 60's phenomenon? I have a mom in a nursing home, and the PBS showing of Lawrence Welk reruns is the Saturday evening "activity" at that and many other nursing homes. One of my hidden pleasures is actually Lawrence Welk because they did a lot of cool swing-pop.
Heck, what made Lawrence Welk, well Lawrence Welk, was that he was doing swing-pop long after it was gone, he was doing swing-pop during the great swing-pop desert of the 60's and 70's until swing made a comeback in the 80's with the retro-revival of ballroom dance. Lawrence Welk appealed to an audience that had no stake in rock-and-roll (old fogeys, families of recent European immigrants)and it was a 60's phenom because in the 40's it would have not had its counter-revolutionary retro-before-retro-was-cool appeal.
Unless I get creamed by an SUV or drop dead from a cardiac infarct, I guess some day I will spend some time as an inmate^H^H^H^H^Hresident of a nursing home, and I cringe thinking about what music will get played when I am too impaired to work the channel selection controls. It will be a special kind of Hell not to be able to move and to have to listen to, say, 90's vintage pop or country.
What about the choice of *not buying it*?
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
If their software really worked as well as they say it does, they would be using it to become rockstars so they can get handjobs from 14 year old girls.
Oh well it has to be better than Amazon, who thinks because I like Alice in Chains I would also like Poodle of Mudddd
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Why is it so foreign a concept that humans would prefer certain subsets of frequencies, dynamics, chord progressions, and so on?
If someone does end on the tonic, it's going to frustrate a piece, for example. It doesn't take a learned audience to notice this, but a trained audience will realize why the piece doesn't sound finished. (The tonic is the first note in the scale a piece is in.)
The blues is formulaic. It sticks to the same chord progressions. Rock sticks to a similar set of chord progressions.. This is because people found out that III-IV-VI-I, for example, sounds weird and uncomfortable. A I-IV-V-I is predictable, but it sounds pretty good none the less.
I can listen to Wilco, and hear the same underpinnings and assumptions to music as I will in the Beatles as I will in Britney. I prefer the instrumentation of Wilco, myself, but they all follow from the same set of instructions.
It's why Charles Ives will never be popular. It may be appreciated, I may love it, but I know it's going to be rough listening at times.
I am pretty sure that I could develop a similar algorithm for a trained human, taking just the principles outlined in classical music. I've thought of taking classical pieces and progressions and distilling them into pop music as an experiment. I know it would sell, because it follows the rules well.
The rules have already been established. The innovation here is being able to separate the frequencies in the wave and apply the rules.
The RIAA and the music labels are totally redundant! what do they do for us? they quite literally manufacture music, and their by-product is arrogent celebrities who call themselves artists. For me atleast, the only reason that i listen to manufactured music is to forfill that itch in my head from hearing it somewhere else. I know the song is crap, i know that half the fake synthed instruments sound so bad its like listening to a midi file, i know the lyrics are going to contain the word baby atleast 15 times and i know that its a cover or has a stolen melody but i dont care because its just something i listen to because it sounds abit catchy. Do we really need an entire industry and all that hype to create these things? the internet does an amazing job of propogating memes like this. (just look how good kazaa is at distribution) the RIAA has no use, it needs to be taken out the back and shot like an old dog.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"The thing you learn is that popular music is easy. The song will play itself. So all you need to do is make it sing a little, make it human, and not fuck it up."
Lou Reed
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
I'm New Here
It's just a bunch of heresay. Totally worthless
if( artistMakesMoney == true)
goto oppsIDidItAgain;
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Seriously. I'm not kidding. Who the hell are they talking about?
s'wut i sed.
For that algorithm to be accurate, you'd have to take groupthink into account.
I've said perfectly valid things before and had them modded down, and as a result people saw it as a negative comment and didn't mod it back up. The negative mod it already had made people perceive it negatively whether they realized it or not as they read it. I've even written obvious sarcastic jokes that were modded as trolls and therefore viewed as trolls from then on. If that first mod on it had been "Funny," it would have been the other way around.
It's interesting how a single word of "Troll," "Funny," "Flamebait," or whatever can affect how everyone else reads into the tone of your post. Nobody is objective but are instead victims of groupthink, which is why the moderation system sometimes appears broken.
There are a lot of very, very stupid moderators who visit Slashdot, I'm sorry to say. Instead of replying in disagreement, they just mod you down.
Good point. Back when I took an intro to meteorology course as a freshman in college, the instructor said that you'd be right 90% of the time if you ran a weather forecast that tomorrow would be pretty much like today--but it's the 10% that people care about.
Would these folks have predicted the rise of punk, which revolted against overblown "progressive rock" and psychedelia just as Classicism punctured the overblown Rococo and Neoclassicism took the wind out of the sails of the Romantic era? Sure, now that they've already been and gone, they have their clusters in song space...but what's going to be the next thing, as people get sick of cookie cutter boy bands and teenaged sluts, and the self-aggrandizing rappers have rung all the changes they can on rhythmic speech and the dregs of urban culture? Once they can figure that out, then they'll really have something.
essentially, this is good for predicting good pop music. Unfortuanately this does not mesh well with intentional discordance, and intentional compositional 'errors' found in modern composition. Of course, tehse people are uninterested in this machine for qualifying music anyway. Besides, I thought that marketing and image were what really mattered.
Photos.
The reason you can't edit posts is because posts are modorated.
You'd have people getting a highly moderated post and then changing it to something that wasn't what it was moderated for. Our friend the old bait and switch.
Tell people what they want to hear, let it be moderated up, tell people what you actually wanted to say. Or post some questionable ascii art.
Best case is they allow you to edit posts before any moderation is done. But, that's what the preview button is for. The idea is that you think about what you're going to say before you post. If people could edit posts there would be a lot more knee jerk reactions.
So no, it has nothing to do with the year we live in. It has to do with encouraging better posting practices and keeping the trolls at bay. The wheel was invented thousands of years ago, we're not giving up on that one any time soon are we?
Ben
Work Safe Porn
To truly predict the success of popular music, you'd have to predict and simulate society. You can't do that.
Would this software have been able to predict the advent of new wave in the 80s? What about the shift to grunge in the 90s? Or the rise of rap and dance music?
Things change, and there are reactive cycles in pop culture that can't be predicted.
In Snowcrash, there was a type of music called "Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge". Now, obviously we don't have that today, but 50 years ago nobody even imagined drum & bass, or house, or trance, etc. So here's the question I pose to Slashdot:
What genres of music do you think will make their way into existence in the near future, what will they sound like, and why will they be created?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
What I really want to know is how high do they score John Cage's 4'33?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/205122 1&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=188
I'd hit it.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Basically what their claim boils down to, is the same thing as the premise behind phycohistory in Isaac Asimovs foundation series, the idea is that whilst individually what we will like/think is impossible to predict, as large groups a lot of stuff cancels, so that the resultant group think is far more predictable.
Of course their use of past hits, means the data is not quite pure, as it's been filtered by the music industry, before it has been filtered by the the public; this is a place where the new world of internet music can help, if we let any one who likes submit music into the system, then over time we can develop purer data.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
The software thats been cooked basically gives record execs another means of increasing their hit:miss ratio.
So think of it this way, the RIAA claims that they charge high prices to make up for all the flops. They now have a new means to weed out the money wasters. Profit goes up, prices go down... right?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I've been part of that scene and once you've got the bug, there's no escaping. I haven't touched a tracker or made music for ages, and one of the next things I want to buy myself for xmass is a midi kb.
Some of the trackers of way back have become professional music artists. (and I mean true artists, not pop idols or 'project products') I still have the greatest respect for the technical skill of Necros, Basehead, WAVE, Carebear, PurpleMotion.. they see sound and waves like no other artist will ever see them.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I put Nirvana's In Utero through this system and it is supposed to suck. I will stick to Brittany Spears I guess.
---ken
They are all idiots.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
So, am I supposed to take the article seriously? Is it anywhere near April 1? I wonder what Dave Barry has to say about this.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
to see if there is a new hit coming, listen to JJJ radio in Australia or on the web. What they play now is a hit on commercial radio 6 months later. and what they don't play will be a hit for the next 10 minutes. Pop culture sux.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
And even then, correlation between data does not mean there is causal relation, although *pleasing* to the ear is certainly why we hear at music.
Well, I assume that this program is a useful predicator of hitability, which is all you need. There's really no reason for record companies to establish causality - *why* this will be a hit. It doesn't even have to work for all songs, as long as it on average does better than a random pick. Obviously, since the "hitability" can't affect the algorithm score, the direction of any causality is clear, even if the mechanics of it is unknown.
However, it only makes sense if the program can do it better than a human - or that their combined opinion is better than a human alone. I think it is quite possible that computers can find properties that a record executive wouldn't recognize on a concious level - but that would still affect its "hitability".
Let's say you have 20 good hit candidates that the record execs have picked. If the computer program can pick 10, and do better in "hitability" than picking 10 at random, it has a value. It doesn't matter if it doesn't have a clue on 5 of them, or if it's only 60% sure that this hit is better than that hit. It helps.
Of course, it means that "unlikely" hits won't happen, since they don't get selected. On the other hand, when it comes to finding the next mainstream hit, I don't think it matters. And like it or not, they're the bread and butter of the music industry. A good mainstream hit.
The problem is applying that logic to "stake out" a new direction in music. It's kinda like women's skirts, they can be long or short but the fashion is always in motion. Then the number crunchers can find the optimal length of skirts to sell to the "mainstream" this year. The music industry seems to be struggeling to realize this, instead trying to sell last years fashion in a new wrapper rather than to lead it on a new path.
Even the music industry needs to be going somewhere - even if it's running around in circles, trends blooming and fading will drive sales - both of new bands and of old classics which are now "in" again as retro bands. But an algorithm as this is simply directly opposed to such an idea - it's likely to produce more of the same.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are many songs which were never number one hits, but which remained popular, or even gained popularity, for many years after their releases. In short, they have become "classics". Also, some songs are instant hits, but are forgotten as just as quickly. (Macarena, Blue Da Ba Di, Chihuahua, Doop, etc)
I wonder how the HMI system will cope with these two different cases. Maybe it will group potential classics with existing classics. Maybe classics are songs which have some unique quality which make them stand out in the collective consciousness of the music-listening public and therefore remain popular. (Bohemian Rhapsody springs to mind)
Yerricde only has 20 more posts to hit the big 10k total comments. Cheer him on!
Check it out here.
I'm writing to make you an appointment: the company is located in Barcelona, Barcelona belongs to Catalonia, not Spain.
that's all
Contact
Europe
C/Artesans, 10
08290 Cerdanyola del Valles
Barcelona, Catalunya
What about LYRICS? No algorithm will be capable of predicting weather people will be deeply affected by meaningful lyrics.
Of course good music is important, but very often what tells appart the good and the bad songs, are the impression made on my by the lyrics. Songs should be ways of expressing peoples feelings and emotions. A catchy melody, or in this case a melody similar to that used in previous songs, just isn't enough.
fb4f sez: 'Paraphrasing the article, a Spanish company called Polyphonic HMI has made a business out of analyzing song submissions and predicting their "hitability".'
Figure: Despite the fact that subliminal advertising is 99% bogus, and Freud's thanatos theory is 101% bogus, alcohol and tobacco companies have been using the combination of the two, in the form of death imagery airbrushed into their ads, for over 30 years. They have no evidence it works, but JUST IN CASE they can grab another tenth of percentage point of market share, they keep paying artists thousands of dollars to do this.
The same will apply here. Record publishers will pay money just in case they can make more money, no matter how ridiculous the premise.
This algorithm could actually produce enough positives to convince people it works, if there were sufficient sampling of the population on what it is they like about a sufficient sampling of songs.
It will, however, produce a lot of false negatives when its tried on those songs which don't fit the pop definitions. Songs like "Luftballoon" and "The Music Box Song" were pop hits because they were almost meme-like catchy. Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue" was a pop hit despite being based in country rather than pop. And, the algorithm will completely miss anything truly innovative. There would be lots of false negatives, and of course as negatives they'd be unlikely to be reviewed later as evidence the proces was broken. There would probably be very few false positives, and that too would appear to support the algorithm (beacuse people trying to maximize income are highly unlikely to grasp the statistical concepts of alpha level, beta level, and power).
And perhaps this could be a good thing. If the RIAA crowd started relying on such Artificial Stupidity (what else can you call something that picks the winners that these losers sell), then the truly innovative will be forced to operate under a different paradigm. Maybe something like MP3.com/Magnatunes, etc. Maybe self-produced and distributed via the net, bypasing the record companies altogether. Maybe becoming the seed of an as yet unthought of social art system that will fill the gap when the RIAA finally eats itself.
On the other hand, given sufficient sampling of the population, and where to hit who on the head with a hammer to make them stop doing some specific stupid shit, I could develop an algorithm to support my new science of Corrective Phrenology*. And if it had any chance of working on the RIAA types, I would.
(* For those who missed the first week of Psychology 101, phrenology is the discredited pseudo-science of predicting personality and mental disorders according to the minor variations in head/skull shape; bumps.)
[If you find any spelling errors, it doesn't mean I don't care about what I write. It means I don't care what you think about it.]
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Do it yourself. It's called Open Source for a reason.
This sig intentionally left blank
I think there exists an attribute that a song must have for more people to like it. That's what makes a hit, the amount of people that like the song.
Non-mainstream music usually appeals to people have been listening to that style for a long time. For example I don't listen to heavy metal or thrasher music, but I like Refuse Resist by Sepultura (sp?). Why is that? I think it's because that song has the magic attribute that makes it palatable to non-metal-heads (the genereal music listening public).
Ironically, these types of song won't appeal to the fans that listen to that type of music a lot because it's too 'mainstream'.
I think, in theory, it's possible to have an algorithm to detect this 'magic attribute' in a song and rate the song's mainstream potential, but it'd be real complicated.
You couldn't take into account things like nostalgia.
It's sort of like writing an algorithm to detect how funny a joke is. In theory you could, but you'd have to have so many factors (eg current rumours) that it's impractical.
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
... a new way of "music consultants" to say that John Qbic will and when asked why thay will say:
- we have a scientific and proven method that even has an algorithm to sum all variables...
when in truth they should say:
- it's a guess... we've got the numbers from our assess...
Of course, this algorithm may not directly describe our interests, just the algorithm of the RIAA that has always guided our interests.
Of course then we wouldn't have been treated to Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Laaaaaaaaaay". Or to "They're coming to take me away ha ha, ho ho, hee hee, to the funny farm where life is free....
There is good music out there for those who look for it, start by skipping any artist you have heard on the radio or, god forbid, MTV. some places to look are Indie sites such as www.ampcast.com and programs like iRate Radio will help you, especially iRate.
check out Apotheosis by The Sleeping Prophet
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Pachebel's Cannon in D. That's all you need. You either have to have the same chord progression, or just use the same chords in a different order. For some reason, it spawns a hit.
Examples include: "Basketcase" by Green Day, "Want you bad" by the Offspring, and "Glycerine" by Bush. Of course, you could always do the obvious thing and base an entire R&B song off of it. That'd be a hit, no prob.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
If that ain't hyped, i eat my mouse.
Check out The Manual: How to have a Number One - The easy Way . Its absolutely hilarious and it explains phenomena like Aqua's "Barbie Girl". Unfortunatly their PHP code has a fencepost error so you'll have to edit the chapter number in the URL by hand.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
what would we get if we used genetic algorithms to evolve a large population of potential hits (initializing with white noise) with this hittability tester used as the fitness criterion?
that's a scientific experiment i'd like to perform. too bad that algorithm is proprietary... >:(
The song she won a grammy for, she didn't write.
Though she may not use sex to sell music, plays instruments and is associated with a different genre, as far as I'm concerned, she is a Britney clone.
She's still a tool of the record industry.
She's just a token piece of variety.
She's popular because she's played on the radio, not played on the radio because she's popular.
It's really clear hit music != good music, many really good musical articles have been silently tucked away to make room for the hit music.
Hit music is only popular because it is simple, has lot of repetition and fools people into thinking it is `good music'.
Brainwashed masses wouldn't know any better since the really good music has been silenced because it doesn't sell.
Ok, I lied, good music does sell, but it doesn't create big revenue in short time, like hit music.
- Voice of Ambience -
Step into the way-back machine. Hearken back to the 80's when people had their Amigas and they wrote songs for MOD trackers in their free time, and distributed them via dial-up bulletin board services that were ubiquitous through the 80's to early 90's before web browsers were developed and the net became commercialized.
These MODs, containing a number of samples and a playback script similar in concept, but different in structure to MIDI files, were to music what Linux is to operating systems- an open sourced, freely downloadable form of music, for which the artist earned no royalties. The MOD format was originally created to make game sountrack music on early computers with limited resources (such as the Amiga with it's 512 KB of memory) but has grown into a format of its own, with many offshoots such as Screamtracker (.s3m), Impulse Tracker (.it), and Fast Tracker (.xm), just to name a few. The vast majority of module music is of the techno genre, although some rock, pop, and even classical has been produced by music coders.
In the late eighties, there was a group called the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front). They used to call themselves the JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mummu- go read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson to learn more about the JAMs), and for a while, they called themselves the Timelords. The KLF had a knack for getting in trouble for unauthorized use of samples from other people's music. They were forced to destroy all copies of an album they released (the 1987 album, IIRC) to avoid lawsuits. Because of this, they came to view the entire music industry as agents of the Illuminati, a supersecret organization hell bent on controlling what the world sees and hears.
Later, an unrelated KLF emerged, called the Kosmic Loader Foundation. They used to make the music for "loaders", or short demo programs that came up when you launched cracked games. (Remember the wonderful world of demos and the demo scene?) Anyway, they changed their name to KFMF, or Kosmic Free Music Foundation. Whatever music they produced, you could download for free, no questions asked. Or you could purchase CDs with their music (in both tracked and MP3 format) for a nominal fee. Of course, the idea for their tracked music was the same as for open-source software: If you modify a song or "rip" the samples, at least give credit where it's due.
Sadly, the KFMF no longer exists, and pretty much the entire demo scene has fallen by the wayside, but is still alive with tracked music at places like the aforementioned Mod Archive and Nectarine Radio. Nowadays, programs such as Cakewalk, Reason, and Cubase VST have replaced trackers (but are very expensive, unlike trackers, which have always been free.) Like trackers, they have their legions of adherents who create and swap music files, plugins, and effects, but the idea remains the same: If music was open-sourced, free as in speech and free as in beer, nobody could control it, no RIAA, Illuminati, or whatever.
1) seems like if you know the algorithm it's only a matter of time before you use it to automatically write good songs... then just add a popular voice and you're golden.
2)...
3)Profit!
can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality
... you say you listen to music, but you want a computer program to tell you what you don't like?
Um
Feh. The formula has been a non-secret for years:
ABACAB
It was so familiar that even Genesis used it recursively.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
A formula for success. Yes, there it is, the holy grail of the music industry.
But hey, when you believe in copy-protection, I guess all things are possible, which is why I expect the major labels to put this into full production almost immediately.
Look at how sexual selection works, some time. I just pointed my Zapitron mindreader device at a female peacock and then uploaded it to my computer, over my firewire port. Here, I'll paste what she was thinking:
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.