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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."
This is one of the signs of the apocalypsis
What if I like both eighties hair metal and symphonic orchestra? I guess it's okay to reccomend songs from each of those categories, but as the number of preferences rises, wouldn't it become harder and harder to pick even a specific genre to reccomend, much less a specific album?
..... Those weren't "Chords" that you were admiring.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
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...
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I typed in "dog shit" and got Ashlee Simpson's entire catalog! This thing is amazing!
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
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.
"Yes, do continue ..." invited the RIAA executive.
"Oh ... and er ... interesting rhythmic devices too," continued Coons, "which seemed to counterpoint the ... er ... er ..." He floundered.
Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding "counterpoint the complexity of the underlying chromaticism of the ... er ..." He floundered too, but Coons was ready again.
"... humanity of the ..."
"RIAAnanity," Ford hissed at him.
"Ah yes, RIAAnanity (sorry) of the singer's publicity-whored-out soul," Coons felt he was on a home stretch now, "which contrives through the richness of the harmonic structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other," (he was reaching a triumphant crescendo ...) "and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into ... into ... er ..." (... which suddenly gave out on him.) Ford leaped in with the coup de grace:
"Into whatever it was the song was about!"
The RIAA executive stood up.
"No, well you're completely wrong," he said, "I just write top 40 music to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief. I'm going to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out!"
"...counterpoint the complexity of the underlying chromaticism..." He considered this for a moment, and then unplugged the iVog with a grim smile. "Death's too good for them," he said.
This is the first musical taste-type service I've tried that has gotten anywhere close to accurate. In fact, I've found around 10 of the last 15 or so rather likeable. And they have the Dance Hall Crashers listed, which is a great sign.
As to questions about "what if you like both foo and bar styles?" You start with one song or band, and it makes a "channel" out of that type. If you want to explore a different genre, I assume you start over.
It's also full songs, decent quality.
Overall, pretty nice.
See my comment here. it's originally the the B-side of All-of-me sung by Louis Armstrong and shrek baker in 1932.
I wonder if the music genome machine will pull up and other louis armstrong as a match.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
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.
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.
Actually, it's only necessary for some things like a smaller player-only window, or some of the information.
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!"
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.
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Anyway what I was trying to say that there is in fact some GOOD pop out there now and then. If you want to see the talent behind Britney, you need to look at the names of the producers, engineers, song-writers and musicians on the record. The thing I find most disturbing is the, um, let's call it the "racial dimension", especially in the US where music is sickeningly segregated by colour.
Anyway, miles off-topic, we now return you, etc etc. Sheessh. Does anyone else find Friday evenings profoundly depressing?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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.
Who the @#$@#$@# put Rick Springfield on my Steely Dan station?
That's just not right. I think my ears just ran off looking for a new home.
-Tupshin
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.
No Mozart. And if they don't have Mozart, you *know* they won't have anything by dead white guys.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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".
Pop artists are backed up by a stable of studio musicians and probably songwriters for that matter. Someone like Britney may sing well but she doesn't even have to do that because her voice can be tweaked in real time by equipment. For that matter, the band only has to play somewhat compently although studio musicians tend to know what they're doing technically even if they are discouraged (probably) from applying any of their own imagination. The entire performance can be tweaked in real time now.
Billy Ray Cyrus came from the area I grew up in. When he was signed, his band thought they had hit the big time too. Wrong. After the summer road tour and maybe a demo tape, his band was dropped like a bad habit and replaced with studio guys. On the other hand, Steely Dan was doing that long before it occurred to the labels to do it. They write good pop but aren't all that good live. Going to a Dan show won't be unpleasant though because they have always surrounded themselves with competent sidemen. Come to think of it, Jean-Luc Ponty did the same thing. Did anyone ever go to one of his shows to see the goofy violin player with an overinflated opinion of himself? His bands made him look better than he really was too.
Britney's voice all by itself wouldn't carry her. Pavarotti she is not. Without the sideman and technical help and the all important hype and branding, she'd be flipping burgers somewhere. I have absolutely no guilt about ripping on the likes of Britney Spears.
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.
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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.
I suppose the end result of this research is eventually still selling you something, by suggesting stuff that you may like.
I find a basic fallacy in this approach, as in the recommandations of Amazon and the like. People do not get entertainment from stuff they know already, but from *new* stuff, that surprises and sounds/looks unusual and different. It is the same fallacy that leads music producers to look for the a magical "formula" to create pop music, and that only leads to a massive production of crappy music that all sounds the same.
Talking about music with rich and unusual harmonic structures, I think an Honorable Mention should be made for "Election Day" by Arcadia (formed by some Duran Duran members back in 1985). While the sounds may appear almost normal now, I recall that at the time the song was a total mistery until something clicked in your brain and you "got" it. Some older people I know of were openly acknowledging that the song was just too unusual for them to understand. Remarkable.
Hate to editorialize, but I am really suprised at how much Bob's comments are being taken out of context.
He has studied the chord structure in Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," and reports that it is "actually fairly complex,"
He makes no claim that the songs time signature or melody are complex. Just that the chord composition is "fairly complex". And it is. Take another listen. Not a typical progression like in a lot rock and pop.
I know Bob Coons and get to see him play guitar at our weekly jam sessions here at Pandora. He is definitely a smoking guitar player in all kinds of styles, rock, jazz, blues, you name it. Though he would never self-proclaim himself as a "jazz player".
I think a lot of people here are confusing complexity with good music. Just because a songs chord structure is "fairly complex" that doesn't mean its good, or that we think its good, or that the RIAA is paying us to say so. Its just an observation.
As an music analyst here, its important to not let personal taste get in the way of how you look at a song.
Exactly. It's designed to find songs that are musically similar. Don't knock it for what it's not supposed to be.
"Those who analyze art, music or literature too deeply, usually do so because they don't get it."
While that may be true in certain cases, I think a blanket statement like that is actually pretty far off of the mark. I'll agree that those who analyze creative arts 'too deeply' don't get it--if by not getting it you mean have a appreciation for the structure that's different than a casual interpretation.
I've listened to classical music for decades. I find that although from the beginning I could enjoy pieces and appreciated their form, it was a study of formal music theory that gave me new tools for appreciating what I heard. When I hear a composition from one era and can place how the composer rejected the norms of the previous era I have a different--and I feel deeper--appreciation of the pience than if I am in the dark about certain things.
The same goes for literature. Being aware of the significance of certain workplay brings a much greater understanding than just being able to follow the plot on the surface. When reading Orwell's 1984 being aware of the irony of 'doubpleplusungood' make for a richer appreciation than just thinking "wow, they use odd forms instead of the more mainstream 'bad'". Granted it doesn't take much to analyze the irony of the wordplay, but that analysis creates in the reader a different level of appreciation than not analyzing anything.
I guess my point is that just because one can apply an indepth analysis into the struture of a creative piece does not mean they are unable to appreciate a work at face value anymore. It just gives them more tools which they can apply to appreciation of art.
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.
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
"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."