Slashdot Mirror
Dissecting Songs Down to Their 'Musical Genome'
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The company Pandora Media takes a different tack for its online music-recommendation service. When you tell Pandora a song you like or have bought, it doesn't mine its sales database for records of other purchases by those who have bought the song. Instead, it looks for songs with a similar musical profile, based on a database of 300,000 songs rated on up to 400 characteristics like rhythmic syncopation, vamping and vocal harmonies. To analyze the songs, Pandora has hired Bay Area musicians like San Francisco jazz guitarist Bob Coons. 'When Mr. Coons describes a particular song, he uses phrases like the "complexity of the chromaticism" and "richness of the harmonic structure." He has studied the chord structure in Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," and reports that it is "actually fairly complex," ' the Wall Street Journal Online reports."
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm a musician, and I told it some songs I liked and it's playing a customized radio station of songs that I should like... and it's dead on.
The best part is that you can ask it "Why are you playing this song", and it will explain it to you.. in terms of the song structure and things like that.
These are real people analyzing these songs.. this seems like a great service to find new music from bands you don't know. Taking bands out of the context of a "social circle" (like Amazon and itunes do by simply looking at 'people who purchased this also purchased...') is a GREAT idea.
I urge you to support this project if you are a music lover, or at least check it out and listen for a couple hours.
Their system allows you to set different "stations"
Each station gives you the ability to add a few different types of music, but it's not recommended that you try to mix radically different types. You'll have to use old fashioned judgement to choose a broad category you want to listen to, it does the rest of the work exploring similar music.
they've lost a potential customer if i have to turn off popup blocking just to view the site
It wouldn't surprise me too much, she didn't write the song, but rather it was written by Max Martin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
He also wrote songs for Ace of Base, Backstreet Boys, Celene Dion, Kelly Clarkson, etc...
A lot of pop songs are written to be aurally pleasing, and people usually enjoy complex harmonies (whether or not they realize they are complex). That doesn't make them any better, usually it just makes them sound like soulless corporate music (even though they may be immediately pleasing to the ear).
Actually, if you look closer at "Oops" or "Hit me baby", you will notice that they are actually two metal songs in disguise. Imagine the same songs, but done with a good metal band. It wouldn't sound too bad. Meshuggah would of course make the song totally twisted and absurd, but that's not my point here.
Now, try to do the same with a song by JLo or Eminem. Ewww. Would sound worse than Creed.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Informative? Some mods just don't see the "Vocals: Shek Baker" credit on the page.
There is quite a lot going on in modern pop productions.
Harmonicly, they are not too complex, but the arrangements and rhythms are quite fierce.
I generally work out the complexity of music by imagining how hard it would be to notate it.
If you were to score a song like 'Oops I did it again', I reackon it would be thirty or so staves for all the different instruments, be around 20-30 pages long, and look nightmarishly complex. It's so easy to track stuff up nowadays that arrangements have got really dense.
Consider if samples has been used as well.. you would have to listen in to that sample and notate all the instruments it contained.
I also sometimes do tab transcriptions of rock/pop guitar tracks for people. Though the guitarist may not be classicly trained, the complexity and difficulty of playing the parts is often up there with classical work.
That song is fake, just search on google.2 +armstrong+fake
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22Did+it+again%2
Why would you believe some random site w/o looking it up for yourself? If you read something on the internet, that doesn't make it true.
The Satchmo version of "Oops" is a fake, albeit a very funny one. Just the same, I do actually find "Oops" (and a surprising amount of other pop music) to be fairly interesting harmonically, though I could do without the vapid lyrics and Britney's singing. She might actually have a decent set of pipes, but we won't know until she stops it with that little fake pop-tart voice. Madonna stopped doing that after her first couple of albums, and showed herself to be in possession of a remarkably rich voice.
:-)
Britney's also not too bad to look at, but I doubt she'll hold up over the years as well as Kylie Minogue has.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I agree.
If you view it as an engineering problem, the entire song is layer upon layer of instruments and synthesized beats built on top of one another. To make all the components fit together, would of course be complex.
The article refers to the main fact that the music itself, the bass lines, etc. are very complex, not the fact that the lyrics are compelx.
On a side note, wouldn't something like this be much easier to analyze with a computer, something akin to Wolfram's Ringtone engine, except in reverse?
Thats actually not quite accurate. -Pandora requires shockwave Flash version 6 or above. Not javascript. -The popups are only necessary if you laungh the minimized player in a small window. Otherwise, it runs in a standard browser window. But if you'd still like to beat our webmaster, I'd be happy to put you in contact with him.
Harmonically complex? For somebody who has never taken a music theory course, maybe. The song is just trivially switching between a minor key and the relative major key, and uses two chords in each. Yeah, if you try to write it out as though it stayed in one key, the notation gets a little ugly, but...:
Minor key: I V I
Relative Major: V I V I
Relative Minor key: V I V I
Relative Major V I
Relative Minor V I
Or, more traditionally:
VI IIIMaj VI
V I V I
IIImaj VI IIIMaj VI
V I
IIIMaj VI
Harmonically complex is Macarthur Park. "Oops" has the harmonic vocabulary of a turnip.
From http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/music_theor y/writing_unusual_and_original_chord_progressions. html
First, I will show one of the simplest (and most common) way that a songs chord vocabulary is extended, is simply by adding the major chords from the keys parallel minor scale....
(Emphasis mine.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
We don't have any concept of "tags" associated with music. We have a room full of musician analysts, and they listen to songs all day scoring each song on ~400 characteristics. Basically, they create a ~400 dimensional vector for each analyzed song. When you create a station based on a particular artist and/or song, you'll hear songs that are the weighted sum of delta squares across these ~400 dimensions. As you give us positive and negative feedback about the music you hear in a station, we bias the weightings for future playlist generation. It's under constant development, but that's a brief summary of how it works under the covers.
About labels paying us to have their songs indexed, I have trouble seeing that happen. We already buy every CD on all the major labels and analyze them. We also buy every CD from independent musicians that we can get our hands on. All the people here buying the music are independent musicians, so they tend to have a proclivity for independent music. Working here, you get exposed to so much under-the-radar music at times it can be overwhelming.
Also, if you are an independent musician and want to submit your music for analysis, we accept submissions. Drop an email to suggest-music at pandora dot com and Michael will write you back about how that works.
Cheers.
-- Eric
Software Guy @ Pandora
Exactly. It's designed to find songs that are musically similar. Don't knock it for what it's not supposed to be.
"Oops I did it again" is a cover of a Louis Armstrong song from the 1930's.
Brittney Spears is in no way, shape, or form, even remotely responsible for that piece of music, or lyrics.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Is Soundflavor.com. They let you build playlists and get recommendations, relevancy ranked, that would fit the mood/lyrics/style/etc.. of that list. The advanced search shows you a little bit about the characteristics they have on each song. No I don't work there, but I know people that do and find it very useful for finding music for a particular themed party or event. There is also a social networking component where if you "trust" other members' musical tastes your recommendations are changed by how they've rated different songs.
Actually, that was a parody -- and a very funny one too. You can download it here. In actual fact, as Wikipedia says, "Oops!... I Did It Again was written and produced by constant suppliers Max Martin and Rami."