Slashdot Mirror
Software Predicts Music Success
Frankenbuffer writes "The Globe and Mail today reports that MIT researchers have developed a computer program to analyze pop music and predict how people will react to it. The method, developed at MIT's Media Laboratory, analyzes the pitch, rhythm, and other characteristics of music. What makes the technology unusual is that it also takes into account social responses to hit music gathered from weblogs, chat rooms, music reviews, and other online discussions, and correlates this data to the music to guage the popularity of a particular sound. According to the researchers, the software has accurately predicted Billboard hits for the past several months."
the record labels are going to get ahold of this and turn it around to actually produce the music. then it will all sound the same.
wait....
printf("Chance of mainstream success: %d%%", awfulness/100);
Once this program is trained enough, join it to a noise generator and a "natural selection" algorythm (typing intended), and you'll have an automated hit composer!!
It will eventually compose the "perfect hit", and kill art as we know it.
Can Independant artists who want to see how well their songs are going to do be able to use this software for themselves?
Sometimes I wish I lived through the 60-70s just to experience the music in person.. sigh..
...welcome our robotic taste-shaping overlords.
I'm not sure I care whether or not this software can predict the next pop craze... but I wouldn't mind a more personalized version. Maybe something that analyzes my mp3 collection, and then automatically checks new releases and looks for tracks that correlate well with my preferences? It would be nice to have a system that pulls out the things I'm most interested in. And a piece of software would be more impartial than the media executives and promoters who want to sell me the "next big sound."
I think lots of people would love something like that. If iTunes automatically integrated technology like that, I think it would be a hit. And best of all, it would level the playing field. Small bands could "get noticed" by the common person if their sound was something that the given person liked.
As we embed more and more intelligence into the machines around us, Ray Kurzweil's singularity seems more and more real.
In fact, although we haven't yet achieve immortality, I'd argue that we've already crossed the threshold between biology and machines in many cases. Modern man is already inseparable from his technology. My son's insulin pump that calculates his insulin and automatically injects it, my mother-in-laws replacement hip, my software containing the combined wisdom of my business workday the past 2 years, the list goes on, and is getting longer every day.
At what point would we look back and say that we crossed the line, the point where the singularity as Ray forsees it, has been passed?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
function format(){i onal.playlist.min*own.product)
if(record.company)
purchase(radio.nat
return billBoard.ChartPosition();
}
... if the fed Miles Davis' Bitches Brew into this.
:-)
Darn thing would BSOD right on the spot, I'll bet.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Now if they could just crack the algorithm the music industry uses to generate music, all of the geeks of the world could create free music that sounds just like Britny Spears/P Dilldy dooldy whatever/Pop or Rap Group D'jour....
No wait, on second thought I'd rather keep my sanity.
Joking aside, this sort of research might be interesting from a psychological point of view. If they've developed an algorith that can tell what music is "good" it seems like with some proper research it might provide some insite into the way the brain process music, which could help scientists to better understand the way the brain interprets patterns, etc. If such an algorithm could be used to generate "good" music, it might be useful for things like games, where the game could provide parameters based on what's going on, and algorithmically generate appropriate music.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
According to the researchers, the software has accurately predicted Billboard hits for the past several months.
... maybe I'm in the wrong business.
Hell, I can do that. My friends have noticed that, for a long time, any piece of popular music that I can't stand to hear becomes a hit. Hm
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
First they tell us that the foil hats are bad and now they tell us what to listen to!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I guess that means it has been in active use for YEARS already.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
This is not the first such program, and I suspect it shares the failing of its predecessors... It will not predict new trends, it will only follow existing ones. The more it is used to decide if an artist is going to be promoted, the less variety we will see in the music world. When new artists can no longer make it unless they are cookie-cutter copies of current acts (which has arguably already happened), the mainstream music scene will cease to evolve, and the really progressive, groundbreaking groups with a chance to become superstars and jumpstart new genres will be buried even farther under a pile of sameness.
for up-and-coming artists? Music companies will be able to use this to pay artists less because the computer doesn't like their music.
MAL (Music AnaLyzer): "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I don't like that."
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
If that's the case, the results may look a little like google. For example, a review of Gwen Steffani's new album: An upbeat, poppy sound, Gwen Steffani nude, Gwen Steffani fakes, free nude Gwen Steffani pictures, free nude celebrities, with more complexity than her previous albums.
Great. So now the recording labels will be able to take a demo, run it through the software, and know exactly how bad a contract they can afford to offer you. Yet another reason to publish independently.
Fortunately, this does seem to only apply to fluffy pop music. Bands in less market-driven genres will hopefully continue to rely on good song writing and support from their audiences to drive sales.
I wrote a predictor too. It's a neural net, actually.
int music_predictor(int artist_type,float rhythm, int genre, int tempo, int male_or_female, int quality, int singing_quality, int band_quality, int number_of_band_members) {
if (artist_type == BIG_NAME_POP_ARTIST_WITH_STUDIO_BACKING)
return true;
else
return false;
}
Ok, so it's a one-axon neural net. But it gets 99%+ accuracy.
On a personal level, I think we're going to head into an era where experimentation and unique sounds will be cherished. We've been listening to this sort of tin-pan alley redux for about 10-20 years now, and a lot of people sense discomfort with the existing pop music trends. Look at the 40s-70s and I think you'll see the same sort of musical revolution in the next 30 years.
Didn't RTFA, but I'm going to guess that this only works on the MTV (or whatever's popular now) drones who all listen to the same damn thing. "Oh! Its a cookie-cutter rap about slappin' bitches an' gettin' shot! It'll do well! Oh! It's a chessy pop song about some bimbo's lover cheating on her! It'll do well!"
I'll be impressed if it comes in an iTunes plugin that analyzes your tastes based on your ratings for songs (classical, jazz, j-pop, new-age hippie worship meditation crap, children's sing-a-longs, whatever floats your boat), and can reccommend music for you and have it be correct 95% of the time.
Dupe! ;)
"Some people really care about instrument sounds and complexity of the music," Mr. Whitman said. "But the 14-year-old teenage girl could care less, as long as her friends are listening to it."
I maintain that the friends of this teenage girl are listening to whatever is playing on Cool Hitz 9602KXQZ.
The article does make one mention of the software picking up on a popular band that record companies had passed over, but which had a growing underground fan movement. Again, so what -- they say themselves that one of the main things their software does is analyze popular music discussion in forums, chat sites, etc. For all we know, the only thing that happened in this case is that the software noticed a lot of people were talking about the band "Crossfade."
We don't need software to predict how many posts will mention Britney Spears even though she faded away years ago. She's no longer an appropriate proxy for manufactured pop music. Pay attention people. It's 50 Cent's world, we just live in it.
Hmm, i seem to recall watching an episode of "the many loves of dobbie gillis" (on nick at night, not live). Bob denver's character, Maynard, with the assistance of a machine created more popular songs depending on how many sales they wanted. Long story short, the truely popular song was just a bunch of random noise.
epic
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
This reminds me of something I've heard before:
Decoding the Algorithm for Pop Music
What will stop people uploading to sites like http://www.theupload.com/ ? How are they monitored?
I know I'm not the first, but is it so hard to spellcheck?
Even though a system such as this would seem to have the logical result of killing the art of music, it simply can not.
As a musician I have noticed that the more I study music theory (theory is really just the language to describe music) the more I come to realize that almost all music is the same. You can spot similarities between four hundred year old classics and current "Indie"/Pop/Rock/Whatever, the connection is there.
So what might you ask makes it different?
The style makes it different. The way the individual artist performs/arranges/records a piece. Not to mention that lyrical content adds a whole new dimension?
Saying something like this will ruin the art of music is like saying that the grammar checker in any document editor ruins the art of writing. Though it is neat that a program could possible sort out "popular" music, which just means it's able to emulate the human ear just a little bit.
The assumption is that people will want MORE of the crap thats currently available. I'm not so sure this is a safe bet.
There was a time when NIN was the hit band to listen to.. Then the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Before that we'd have Clapton and The Beatles.. Is that accounted for, as well?
"But the 14-year-old teenage girl could care less, as long as her friends are listening to it." - Lovely.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
We're a hop, skip and jump from this to having the computer just write the music itself. Now all we need are some barely legal girls with breast implants to "sing" the output. Actually, let's just skip the music.
:) In Windows maybe - too funky for it to handle.
On any other machine it'd probably open up one of those trippy visualisations.
Read the whole story, at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm
If you're interested, Greg Egan's site: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/
.sigs: Just Say No!
is because its generally simplistic.
But then I don't generally choose to listen to pop.
What proportion of pop music sales are due to the televised video?
Repetitive moronic pap sells because there are sexy women performing courtship rituals on the video not because of the music itself.
Yes, I am an old heavy metal fan.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I doubt this will work very well. Almost all pop songs use the same few major chords, the same structure, and the same tempo; and draw their lyrics from the same limited pool (meaningless love song, "life sucks," or "I'm a tough guy"). They're basically all the same, yet some songs are successful and others flop.
It's because you can't analyze an artistic work in the same way you analyze data. I hesitate to use the word "artistic" for bad music like this, but technically speaking, it isart, and the intangibles determine success more than anything else. In this case, the intangibles are the physical attractiveness of the peformers, how many radio spins the record company buys, whether MTV deigns to play the video, and a lot of dumb luck and promotion.
This software probably sounds like a wet dream come true to the record companies, but I don't think they'll be using it for long.
Why is male_or_female an int?
Abolish Copyright. Restore Freedom.
The big thing that any serious algorithm for predicting hits would have to overcome is that the hoi polloi taste in music changes. Even the average 14-year-old girl's tastes will change with time. Even though the idea of comparing the music to music with a known response is a good one, there are still times when everything changes. I don't think any algorithm could have predicted the massive success of punk rock or grunge before the Sex Pistols or Nirvana. When the next "revolution" comes in music, it'll most likely still be unpredicted.
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
Applying Turing Test to human race . . . .
. . .
. . .
complete!
Status: human race failed.
The secret to success is apparently: more cowbell.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Canadian singer Avril Lavigne is filing suit against MIT's Media Laboratory for disclosing patented technology. According to her lawyers, "You fall and you crawl and you break and you take what you get"
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Is this the end of derivative, untalented music, or the beginning?...
See http://www.hitsongscience.com/technology.php for the developer's description, and1 710,1391951,00.html for The Guardian's write up.
see http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,1
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Trying to shape a song so it becomes successful has been tried many times before - with unsatisfying success. On a higher level it led to the categories of music we know today, like Blues, Trance, Metal, etc.. On a lower level we see follow-ups to first hits, that use the same kind of harmonies, rhythm and sounds. But there still are a lot of songs that become successful not because they sound the same like other songs but because they are innovative, think Kraftwerk or Nirvana.
Music trends are a system between unification and diversification. The more songs sound alike, the more people will appreciate songs that differ and vice versa. This system is very hard to predict. I am sure the music industry tries to predict it and synthesize hit records and I think this is why there are so few truely creative artists with a contract from a major record label.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Editors at popular geek site slashdot.org have created an algorithm which predicts the success of any potential duplicate story on the web site, and are using it to make usch posts with increasing regularity. The software determines whether the original story contains any letters from a to z (case-insensitive), and of it finds them, the post is deemed to be dupe-worthy. This program has been in operation now for more years than anybody care to frickin' remember...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
...that hits have anything to do with their content? People are simple: they like music when it's force fed to them all the time. Buy off enough radio stations, tv commercial producers and malls, and BAM! It's a miracle, you've got a hit!
Besides, isn't this Slashdot? I thought we abandoned the idea that the record industry is actually relying on quality content to make money back during the lawsuits, or the collusive price gougings, or during the suck that was music around the turn of the millenium, (or maybe when we first started stealing from them, it's hard to say).
Confessions of a Record Producer probably demands a plug.
OMG! George Lucas is raping my childhood!
This has been around for at least a year now.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
Yes, this is very similar. However, there is a difference. This uses algorithms to compare one type of music to successful songs. However The others only used hard facts such chart ratings, money earned, etc. This one also uses information gathered from message boards and blogs to aid in the comparisons. The article states this.
can it determine if a story on slashdot is a dupe? that would make it worth buying
-- lol pwned
> It would be nice to have a system that pulls out the things I'm most interested in.
;)
;)
What you are talking about is a spam filter for music! Well.. that would be wonderful.
But then you would have to wait some weeks until you could listen to the next hour of music, because most radios and other sources would return quietness for most of their time.
Or you would have to push EVERY music on the planet trough it. Even the street musicians from some mountan village in nepal oder the whate-veryo-ucall'me-islands.
Surely this would be great, and theoretically it would surely be possible.... but practically... well...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
When the Play button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's music-appreciation buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the hearing centres of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered three minutes of sound that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Britney Spears.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
analyze p2p traffic??
Real easy to find whats hot and whats not..
Works for movies, music, whatever.
+5 DUH..
Fuck, I though music was at its lowest when fucking Maroon 5 came and showed everyone how the same heartbreak/sad love song sang with similar melodies could be loved by many fucking retards every time, causing all 5% of the radio's acceptable music to sliver away to 1% as a million maroon 5 and rob thomas (seriously, if anyone is thinking of comitting suicide, please kill him first before you go) appeared to kill radio completely. Straight out, if you listen to mainstream music or pop or r&b (the new r&b) stations, then fuck you, stop supporting this massive hunk of rat shit. But now, we are going to have a million songs that are "optimized" to be the best sounding, which will result in what? More diversity? More experimenting? More original? Fuck no! The same old shit but sounding even more like each other, if that's even possible, and predicted by a program that recognizes Maria Carey, Rob Thomas, Maroon 5, and that fuck Powers guy, as the best. I swear, thank god for XMRadio and Sirius and MP3 CD players, because driving in a car will now include one more reason to swerve into oncoming traffic and take out as many people in other cars listening joyfully to this same old fucking crap.
-Mike
Then again, they could hear the clamoring over installing DRM Rootkits without the software.
Now I will know exactly what to stay away from.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Disclaimer: I'm a jazz musician
I have a feeling they're predicting success more from weblogs than anything else. The problem with prediciting new hits by analyzing past data is that new music comes from a distinctly human creativity process that's not readily quantifiable.
If you fed all the music of the 1940s into such a program and then asked it to predict the success-ability of a 1950s rock and roll song you'd probably get does-not-compute. Similarly you couldn't predict 60s pop from 50s rock and roll, or 70s punk from 60s pop. And where would something like rap fit in? Every new successful song has something uniquely undefinable that spurs it's popularity.
When I was in college I took a music class where we tried to quantify every aspect of certain pieces of music. The result -- can't be done. What makes even a simple one line melody with no accompaniment "likeable" or "great" comes from a multiplicity of undefinable variables. And for each layer of accompaniment that gets added the music's complexity increases exponetially.
Then again I could be completely wrong.
Any program that looks at content to discover hit-ness is destined for failure. For example: Is disco a hit? Is third wave ska? (No offense to the Bee Gees or Reel Big Fish, but the answer requires deontic f'ing modal logic.) You know who knows? Tower of Power:
"As you're striving to find the right road,
There's one thing that you should know:
What's hip today might become passe'.
What is hip? Tell me, tell me, if you think you know.
What is hip? And if you're really hip, the passing years will show
That you're into a hip trip, maybe hipper than hip.
WHAT IS HIP?"
--
So... do I get modded up for referencing metaphysics and funk in the same post?
113th post!!!!!!!!
Robbie Williams will still be crap!
I could do the same thing with any of several open-source data-mining packages (see Weka, http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/) and a spare weekend. There's simply so much data available in the form of Billboard charts extending over 65 years that it would be trivial to define a bunch of parameters and run any of several well-defined models to generate a simple binary classification.
Pandora is already responsible for many cd purchases. So much for napster...
Put in an album or artist, and it will PLAY similar tunes for you.
The best part about it is the "why are you playing this?" description, which explains using musical language the characteristics of the tune.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
So,
The software gathers and collates market indicators on what kind of mishmash music execs like to push, and how they hype it about. Which people, more often than not, then end up buying.
It profiles the result of these decisions, reflecting the 'personality' and 'decision methods' of thos execs - or of whomever pulls *their* strings.
What would happen if the same thing were done with like info on, say, pharma products ? Really credible info ? On what, really ?
Better yet... on election issues. After all, everyone says the truth about their political notions. And no-one ever 'exagerates'. Or 'simulates' - whether for fun or profit. Specially when on the net. Righto.
Well, there's more but I gotta go now. Gotta hop into my GTO and collect overdue rent from a couple of hundred underpriviledged tenants plus a dozen share croppers. I'm sure you understand.
Wasn't this already done on South Park?
I think it was the Faith+1 double platnium episode, but could have another, I havn't seen it recently. And Revenge of the Nerds, some software written or at least assisted music won them control of the council. And then there was Voyager's singing doctor, music is math you can hear. It's only "pop" music, it can't be that hard to make up something and market it successfully, and if it doesn't sell you can blame it on piracy, the RIAA does it all the time.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
But I swear I've heard about this before...
Oh wait... FTFA:
"The company established its credibility in 2002 when RCA used its method to determine the order in which the singles from Christina Aguilera's album Stripped should be released to maximize record sales. Since then, other labels have turned into regular customers."
Insert Sig Here
This can work both ways.. If you dont like the crap that is being put out by the mainstream music industry, just look for low ratings.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When was the last time you saw a wildly successful, ugly pop star?
if(album.marketing_budget >= metric_fuckton){
album.chart_position = 1;
}
Academics is easy!
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Now there's no chance of anything but lousy generic sounding pop music being played on the radio becuase they'll be able to pre-test it and not even bother trying to promote anything but the most money generating tunes.
Thank you Consumer America, for ruining Rock'n'Roll.
These researchers could have made their jobs a lot easier by just measuring payola.
A formula of this nature can surely analyze what worked in the past, but basing the future on the past becomes sketchy territory. I think mass media and mass music grossly underestimate the masses thinking that the same ol' same ol' will keep them happy. For example, me, I want another Britney, except I need her more virgin and more slutty at the same time. OTOH I think the computer would have taken care of that wish ;) ...
If you are a linux user, Amarok might be to your liking.
Its a rather nice KDE music player that can do this sort of thing.
http://amarok.kde.org/
First of all, the big claim made is that "the system has been predicting Billboard hits with surprising accuracy over the past several months." They achieve this one simply by reading weblogs. That is ridiculously simple to do: count the number of times a song is mentioned. Predict based on this value. They have not claimed that they are able to predict success on NEW songs based on scanning the music, they have simply claimed, as above, that they can predict billboard hits. Another easy method for doing this is as follows: Take todays hit-list. Copy it identically. That's tomorrows hit-list. There is not that much change over a day -you will get pretty good accuracy.
Second, the software picks out little known groups with popular sounds that agents have missed (ex. Crossfade). How does the network achieve this amazing (sarcasm) feat? By noticing a spike in focus-group data; "HitPredictor struck gold again in late 2003, when its computers flagged a blip in the focus-group data." Hoorah! MIT has invented an algorithm that finds spikes in data.
Thirdly, the software describes the music it hears, from "sexy to romantic to loud and upbeat". Again, this is not complicated. Just look at weblogs and attach to any song titles nearby descriptor words from a small set. This of course is just an example of a simple way to do it. I'm sure there are others.
But there must be some reason for us reading about it? Mustn't there? Well yes. Firstly, there is profit to be made by individuals offering services. Secondly, you can't write or post stories titled "MIT project achieves nothing interesting".
... it's easy to predict what songs are going to be hits, since the success of any given song is mostly dictated by payola, and has little to do with the merits of the song itself.
Just tune into any pop radio station to find out what the next hit is going to be.
Do people here really think the Top 40 is based on popularity?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As if the crap wasn't canned enough already!
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
Now let's hook this up with WolframTones and see how long it takes to generate a Billboard hit.
The answer might be t -> infinity
Judging by the music on the radio and what my teenage son and his friends actually listen to, these evaluation programs don't work. It appears that the 1970-1985 style rock music is far more popular than the music pushed by the big labels.
Oh well, what the hell...
if we could put the same machines to listen to this music, then we wouldnt have to hurt our ears with this crap.
In my town, there are a number of small bands who usually put on friday all ages shows for around $5. The punk/hardcore scene has fallen apart, and now we have emo, indie, and experimental mainly. Most of these bands are little known outside of my town and the other places on this island where they play. However, one band recently got signed to Immortal Records, a major label. I decided to listen to them... found their purevolume page, and they sound EXACTLY like any other emo band!
It shows to me, if more evidence is needed, that the industry likes music to not "rock the boat," whether to make it easier to promote or easier to smell a hit. All the more reason to outlaw file sharing and the discovery of independant bands...
Can they predict anything else? All those thousands of dollars for tution and all they can do is predict music? At least Nostradomis went out on a limb! NoMorePoints.com
Dupes are glitches in the Matrix, it happens whey *they* change something.
We've already figured out the Machines algorithm for developing pop music, some guy figured out how to "bend the rules" and create an anti-gravity device (also a dupe!). I think they may be on to us, the reset will be coming soon...
You mean MI-God-help-me-T is getting that slow? Think this over: A few months of picking pop hits statistically is nothing but a couple of lucky hours at a craps table. So, you pump out hits based on what have been hits over the past few months. How can you go to MIT and think of trends in that short a term?
You think this program could have picked punk rock when everybody had been listening to disco? Grunge when it had been nothing but heavy metal for five years? Marilyn Manson right at the beginning of the Goth movement? "14-year-old girls" as the article calls them, like youngsters of every generation, want to *own* their music in a generational sense - want to feel that that music is uniquely theirs. They don't wanna listen to the same crap mom and dad did. Who the hell is so culturally blind, that they cannot see that? True, once a genre is born, it settles down into a derivative self-reproducing pattern - for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Then there's a curve ball all of the sudden, and that's the next genre. What next, they start working on perpetual motion again? And don't they realize that refeeding this engine it's own output a few months later is going to change the pattern?
As a market study aide, yes, I can see that. But not as the sole guide. And as for combing blogs for comments about the music, that's not even a whole program. That's a shell script that posts data to Google and curl-scrapes the results and greps for keywords. Show me a studio that relies on this tech and I'll show you a dropped stock in six months.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't be jealous.
I suggest the editors get an "editing" karma for the quality of the articles they post.
And a dupe of a dupe should send the editor to "Karma: Horrible" hell -- doomed to reincarnation.
Some of the lamest most predictable "funny" comments are in this thread. People you're not funny.
eTrade SUCKS
What?!?!?!?
.torrent yet?
:)))
No
I would love to do some "independent verification"
From the description it would seem what they have actually built is a "bad commodity music that people with more money than sense really like"-detector.
A patent on those algorithms would be worth something. The fact is that most people have bad taste. And most of the people spend most of the money.
-- John.
I'm not impressed. I can figure out what the current trends are with a spreadsheet. Keep in mind: this software is not writing music, and it's not predicting what music will sound like in the future -- it is looking at the new music that exists and making a good guess at whether it will be popular. That said, I doubt that it can predict major trend shifts anyway. It probably would have choked on Sgt. Pepper because it didn't sound enough like Donovan.
If this is an indication of Kurtzweil's singularity, well, the singularity to me looks more like Kurzweil's asshole.
#!/usr/bin/python
:)
import sys
import random
import analyze
# Starting Definitions
# Take this garbage from stdin...
music = sys.stdin.read()
musicPart = music.split()
# Run it through that quick hack I wrote last night at 2.
musicAnalyzed = analyze.music(musicPart)
# Good thing the PHB doesn't know that python is human-readable.
score = random.randrange(1, 50)
# The sad truth.
if pop in musicAnalyzed:
mediaScore = score * 100
elif major_labels in musicAnalyzed:
mediaScore = score * major_labels.moneyspent(music)
else:
mediaScore = score / 10
# Time out output our results; then I'll make a quick stop
# for my masters degree.
# This may be bullsh*t, butthe media will buy it
sys.stdout.write(str(score))
DYWYPI?
Amazingly all "jam bands" have registered as complete and utter failures.
It's hard to imagine all the pop bands and artists sounding any more the same than they do now.
You realize this software was produced at the Media Lab, which means that it's almost certainly not what it's hyped up to be, and probably doesn't do anything impressive at all. Predicts the hits? Sure, if you put in grades from reviews in music magazines, wow how surprising.
Related idea, analyzes your taste in music and plays a radio station that is catered to your style.
www.pandora.com
Enjoy!
It was added, unfortuantely. It doesn't fit the style of the language at all.
Anybody who voted to add _Bool should have been stuffed in a box and shipped to the C++ committee. If you want C++, you know where to get it.
It makes perfect sense really. Remember that Hertz is 1/seconds. So we use doller/second to measure popularity. That fits perfectly.
I welcome our music-analysis-software overlords!
With a name like ScrewMaster, you'd fit right in with the music exec crowd... ;-)
I wonder if Sony has any positions open?
The entertainment industry--television, movies, and recording spend tons of money on market research so they can make money. It's necessary for a business to thrive but they leave behind those who don't fit the big money demographics and art is forsaken in favor of glamour.
Along comes a device that measures what's popular so that they can sell more? You'll be stuck having to like whatever the industry wants to record and sell to the bell curve that's inflated by prepubescent bubble-gum smacking artistically dwarfed middle schoolers. If you hated the Backstreet Boys and the insipid dronings of Britney Spears, you'd better start collecting your own field recordings at your favorite live music spots and collecting the essential library of classics before they're extinct along with taste.
This is the worst thing to hit music since Florence Foster Jenkins.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Well, no. Two big things happened during that time that changed music: introduction of blues to a mainstream (read white) audience, and the invention of electric instruments. New musical styles may come into the mainstream, but that latter event will never happen again. There hasn't been any significant instrument created since the 70s, which was really when the synthesizer came in to its own.
They did it.
Madonna is doing it, yet she is doing it with style.
Certain rules are to be followed.
And thats what you condition your software to recognize.
But without the looks and the marketing, its only sound.
I bet the blogs et al. sing diff. tunes accordingly.
It used to be called Alternative.
I used to think music trends changed every ten years, but maybe I was just fed a load and RIAA is making it not true anyways with all the recycling and cashcow pimping.
Anyways, my personal trend has been away from alternative, and more into electronica, which strangely sounds like early New Wave.
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1391842, 00.html about a Spanish piece of software that already did this.
Not revolutionary.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
. . . that predicted Slashdot Post Success.
Or more pertinently, his story 'Beyond the Whistle Test'. But I can't find that on the web at all )-:
I would really love to see Last.fm use it. Then my musicplayer could find music for me and in true amarok-style, it will also search for the album-cover and lyrics.
Todays music all sounds very similar anyway, so it is not surprising that a program can easily group the different genres into categories bases on some kind of statistical analysis of previous tracks of the same type.
I think this is more a sad reflection on the dismal formulaic drivel that the music industry produces.
Hold on, on the one hand you are saying that it identifies decent music, and on the other that "the software has accurately predicted Billboard hits for the past several months".....errrrrrr?
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Now we need a software that generates musical creations at random and kills off the musical "children" that don't succeed according to the rules of the program.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
I hope so!
Of all the indies out there who deserve to have been signed, sealed, and delivered to the masses, no one stands out more than Philip Price. From his own solo work, to the Maggies, to his current band The Winter Pills, I know of no artist more worthy and yet less famous. Probably everyone here knows of someone equally worthy and yet equally obscure....
-- thinkyhead software and media
ALSO FIREFOX 4 LIFE
LOL I AM AWESOME!If You can read this sig you are on the internet
When do they learn that? Hits can't be predicted, its more a question of the right song in the right moment reaching the right people in the right mood (you see, lots of parameters, easy to miss the sweet spot). Ignorrance of that fact and that huge CD sales in 80s and 90s come from us people replacing/ double our record collection by rebuying stuff on digital media explains why the sales numbers are going down, if they went down really, who knows.
Cheers...
I don't have to read the article to assume it's based in statistical methods, based on correlating whatever the algorithm measures to these "social" responses. If you get a similar correlation for a new song, you predict the same success rate. Works 8 out of 10 times for a short period.
Such a model wouldn't say absolutely anything about the psychology behind music appreciation. It's like applying neural networks to predict football results; the network wouldn't understand football, would it?
No, this is another fucked up idea of what science is supposed to be doing. They should try to figure out something meaningful, not try to get rich ASAP.
This system would be intresting if not for one important fact.
The way music sounds has little to zero impact on how well it will sell.
Marketing is the key factor to music sales, ask any quality indie artist.
"it estimates our responses to their responses to our responses and so on. counts the dead... estimates damage..."
I already have such a program: it's called Winamp. I can use it to look at the ID3 tag of the mp3, and if the artist line reads "Audioslave", "Meshuggah", "Alice in Chains", etc. then I know it's good.
Isn't the blog analyzer thing just an extension to the social network analysis that Kleinberg (of Cornell) researched and was posted on Slashdot a while back? That paper showed trends can be extracted from blogs and some such. So in theory, hit records can be predicted this way also. This just means that this new MIT program is just a hack on top of that research paper Kleinberg presented.
Thanks for the link.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
There's a company in Barcelona called Polyphonic HMI that have a service called Hit Song Science. It's been around for several years and they already work for most of the major labels and top producers. http://www.polyphonichmi.com/