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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."
There is a commercial service that does similar analysis on songs to provide a score based on similar genetic algorithms. As I recall you can upload your own music, and for a nominal fee they will provide the analysis. Apparently many music publishers use this service to find songs from new artists that have a higher propobility of success (wide acceptance). I just don't remember the service, but read about it on-line just a year or two ago...
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
It would be interesting to see technology like this at a local level. For instance, being able to tell WinAmp or iTunes that I want to hear songs that are similar in tempo / dynamic range as a particular song.
Or even the ability to sort my personally owned music by it's musical characteristics in order to build play lists of similar music.
Artists are constantly being influenced by other artists, how far does this go? Does it go to the point of some song that has similarities to a previous one (according to some database) is not artistic or original? Is it okay to play more than 2, 3, 4 of the same notes in the same sequence as another song without being attacked for infringement?
Why stop at music? Why not go into visual arts as well? They too have too many similarities that can not be overlooked.
At this logic, Claude Monet, Pierre Renoir, and Camille Pissarro are all are frauds for influencing each other. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also are fraudulent because one of them had to be influencing the other's style. Let's get in touch with their ancestors and see if they will pay up.
PS The only thing complex about Britney Spears is her relationship with former boyfriends and the media
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
OK, so they're assigning tags to songs, weighting the importance of those tags, and recommending songs that we may like due to characteristics that may normally be ignored.
Cool.
A problem -- there is no way they will be hiring enough professionals to grade every song out there that I might be interested in. If they get a sufficient following, I see labels paying to have their songs indexed... good luck to the independent musicians out there.
I would hope that they allow people to assign their own weights to different criteria. This is a major problem with most of the automated referral systems. The "people who have bought this also bought X" model doesn't work for me, because my tastes are different from most people... or so I'd like to believe.
What I'd like to see is a cross-genre analysis of the music that is reviewed. I don't like Pop Country -- so how do I find the Bluegrass I want without weeding through what I consider to be junk?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Only more sphisticated. Several things going on here. It would be wonderful to have the scoring of these songs as played. They you could indeed feed them into Markov models and analyze them. One of the DB admins here did that sort of thing with classical music for his MA years ago with Mozart, Bach, etc. The resultant composer recognizers could correctly identify pieces that were not part of the training sets.
This sort of analysis might be used in copyright infringment cases as well as looking for new artists.
I hate Britney's music as much as the next guy - perhaps more owing to my BFA - Music/Recording degree.
But while being subjected to my young girls' favorite CD (Kids Bop #whatever), I was listening to Oops. As it was a remake, I wasn't, *ahem* visualizing Britney, and I heard the song for what (or whatever) it really is.
And as pop goes, it really isn't badly written at all. The phrasing matches the lyrics superbly. And it's not really that simple, despite its pop-tart packaging.
OBR* - And Ms. Spears has nice breasts.
* - Obligatory Breast Reference
I put in "Weird Al", First they gave me "I lost on Jeopardy", then the Kinks with "In a Foreign Land", now it's the Rembrandts - "Just the way it is, Baby".
While I can see the similarities in syncopation and tone and music feel, it doesn't match the lyrics or the feel of the song. When I'm in a "Weird Al" mood, it's not a Rembrandts mood. The Kinks, maybe.
Ok, now it's "Tears in the Rain" by Triumph....uh guys...not really...
It's a novelty. If anything it can give you a jumping off point for finding new bands. It might actually be better served in the "Indie" community. Give them the well known band you like, and it gives you all the related Indie music. That I would like.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Also, Coons (analyst guy) is talking about the chord structure of the song, not the depth of the lyrical content or even the realization of the chord structure. It's actually really well written from the standpoint of tonal western art music, and compares to a simpler bach chorale when you reduce it to just chords. I remember when I heard this song I was really impressed with it and got a lot of flack for it. A couple days later I played a reduction for some fellow (classically-trained) musicians who thought it was a very nicely laid out chorale. I added the melody on top to reveal the source and everyone was really surprised to find it was Britney Spears :)
I may not personally think very highly of Britney Spears as an artist or performer, but her arrangers/composers know their shit and write some pretty robust stuff. Another example is Autumn Goodbye, which has even more complex chords, lots of counterpoint, etc.
Vamp: (musical) To perform a cyclical musical sequence, allowing musicians to expand on the basic form.
At any rate, I'm impressed. I used to use Amazon to find similar music, but that doesn't really work. If you put in an MTV2 metal band, all the "People who bought this also bought..." links are to more MTV2 metal bands. It's hard to break out of the mainstream.
This, on the other hand, pulled up a bunch of bands that I'm pretty sure don't get commercial *radio play*, much less MTV exposure. Unforetunately, I don't have audio here at work, so I can't speak to the quality of the matches just yet, but I'm sure I'll find something I like that I've never heard of.
This reminds me a lot of a research project I worked on years ago... Evolutionary Music and the Zipf-Mandlebrot Law. Our conclusion back then was that a computer can tell you if music is "pleasant". We didn't want to use 'good' or 'bad' because that would lead to a lot of arguments based on taste, not music.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
My favorite part is the end where he references K.C. Sunshine for the song of the least complexity, "That's the way (uh-uh uh-uh) I like it".
Hey, I like emacs.
Richard Thompson thought it was a fine tune: he covered the tune in his "1,000 Years of Popular Music" live show. You can hear him perform it on NPR's Live in Studio 4A show and sure enough, stripped of all the pop production and processing, there's a nifty song living in there.
Actually, Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa did a heavy version of "Baby One More Time" on the Ready to Rumble soundtrack, and I'll be darned if it doesn't kick quite a bit of butt as well.
Maybe the problem with Britney's music isn't the music but the Britney?
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
In the early 80s Scientific American had one of the first articles I ever read about fractal mathematics and music. It talked about a statistical value called Spectral Density, which varies from white noise to "brown" noise. In white noise the signals have no relation from one moment to the next, as in hailstones randomly falling on a piano keyboard. In brown noise they are strongly related, as in a mouse walking up and down the keys. Fractal patterns have a spectral density somewhere in the middle. Neighboring signals stay around each other for a while, then there's a jump to a different area and it stays around there for a while. The jumps themselves show the same pattern. The article said that almost any piece of music that as wide popular appeal, regardless of the genre, has a fractal Spectral Density. Popular pieces of abstract art were also said to have the same property.
Anyway, I wonder if songs that are similar in the subjective terms Coons uses would be similar in spectral density or some other mathematical way? It would be really interesting to make automated measurements of songs and see if you could get similar clustering.
Unrelatedly... the article went on to say that the human peripheral nervous system produces white noise, but as you probe closer to the central nervous system the signal becomes more and more fractal, as if the nervous system itself is filtering our raw perceptions and passing a fractal version to our brain. In an experiment with radar scans of a college campus full of people moving around, they found that any one scan was predominantly white noise, but the difference between two scans a second or two apart was fractal noise. They speculated that this might be a key to our ability to process the complex, changing world around us and notice subtle but important details, for example when we immediately notice "something odd" about a person. Fascinating stuff.
I don't understand that. Why would the record companies want me to get bored, go do something else, and then fail to click on any buy now links for great songs? At least if I'm there actively skipping, I might be actively buying. If I've tuned it down to background music, no sales will be happening.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
why is it that he elitists believe popular music is simplistic? If it's so simplistic and dumb why doesnt everyone make it and become millionaires?
As a sometime amateur rock musician, I can attest to this. Rock (excluding things like prog rock and speed metal) is a hell of a lot easier to write, play, and sing than pop. Partially it's because I never listened to enough pop songs in depth to learn how to mentally dissect it properly. I listen to, say, late-70's Aerosmith and I can easily tell what every member of the band is doing, and can guess how I would go about emulating it. I hear a song like "Oops I did it again" and it's a wall of sound, totally opaque. I don't hear the individual instruments. I have no clue how I would go about reproducing it.
where there's fish, there's cats
Common question.
There are absolutely live human beings analyzing the music every day. They keep them in a sperate room than us smelly engineers.
To give you an idea of how extensive their work is, they need to rate and identify over 400 seperate musical traits for each song it takes about half an hour to do one.
OBR* - And Ms. Spears has nice
breasts.
* - Obligatory Breast Reference
Nice? Only sometimes,
apparently!
I beta tested this software and it was really fun. A friend of mine is one of the music cataloguers for that company and he got me on the beta. I got some great music recommendations off of it.
... and a few others I can't remember. Then it picks out stuff with the similar characteristics and gives you a little "private radio station" I think is what they called it. Then you can add other artists, songs, albums or genres to give you a little variety. So for example, from my Ben Folds suggestion, I got some selections from Elton John, Joe Jackson, Tori Amos, The Beautiful South, Aimee Mann, etc. etc.
For example, my favorite musician, Ben Folds, had the following characteristics:
Syncopation
Singer / songwriter
Piano lead instrument
Alternative
I then went through and added The Postal Service as a favored artist, then I started getting new flavors added to the mix. Pretty neat.
The hitch comes from the fact that their recommendations aren't always great. You can skip through their recommendations but you're only allowed to do like 6 per hour. To circumvent this, you can rate each song as it's playing (5-point rating system with the highest being "I really like this sound -- play more like this and the lowest being "Don't play anything like this ever again").
It's a fun little app. It's nice to just throw on and leave on all day... a good alternative to cheesy shoutcast stations and it's WAAAAY better than the alternative...... corporate FM crap.
*shudders*
~sj
No particular chorale, it is just grammatical (to borrow a linguistics term) by the standards of common-practice blah blah western art music 18th-19th centuries. It's something Bach could have written, is what I meant by that.
Incidentally, the chord progression for the chorus, if i remember correctly, is as follows:
Dbmin: i-V-VI-VII-III-iv(6)-V-i
it's got a nice symmetry, as well as a very pleasing temporary tonicization of the relative major in the VII-III section, then a perfectly formulaic (that's good) cadential formula, iv-V-i.
If you want to have some fun with your classically trained friends, you could have them play this chord progression through (they'll know what to do with the numbers) once, and they'll probably tell you it's pretty nice. Then have them play it again and sing back the chorus while they play...