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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."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
then it will all sound the same.
Stories like this remind me of the Queen musical We Will Rock You, which is set in a soul-less, commericalised future that caricatures today, where all music is computer generated and the mere posession of a musical instrument is illegal.
Infact, if I remember correctly, there have been previous Slashdot stories covering software that creates 'good' tunes by utilising the same sort of parameters listed in the summary. You could combine the two to make a nice feedback loop - a program that creates a tune, analyses it for potential success, then amends certain variables and repeating the process until you have a song that is so perfect that it causes spontaneous ejaculation.
While it's funny to read these stories and exaggerate or joke about the effects on consumer culture, I do think that some room for complaint is warranted. I believe that the most telling indication of the way things are heading was the news that the DVDs for the Live8 concert(s) were being 'retuned' by clever software in order to eradicate anomalies in vocal performances. UM, HELLO! IT'S A FUCKING LIVE SHOW, THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT. IT'S NOT MEANT TO SOUND LIKE IT'S BEEN FED THROUGH NASA'S SOUND-O-MATIC 500. This one act epitomises everything wrong with today's consumer. Some yuppie in the Live8 marketing team has discovered that Joe fucking Sixpack and Mary Jane Rottencrotch can't deal with the odd off-key lyric or missed note because it might offend their ears. These are the same people who won't buy odd shaped vegetables and who make make purchasing decisions based solely on a combination of obnoxious packaging, patronising and manipulative advertising and celebrity endorsements.
Remember, this is for analysis of "pop" music. Kind of a contrast from what most indie artists are shooting for.
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.
> 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.
Even stuff like the Kinks and the Beatles were regarded as fluff in their day - the thing that will kill music is control of distribution, and patenting of production and arrangement (the RIAA is buying the legislation for one, and I seem to recall a recent /. story about patenting a story theme - if that's true, music arrangements and production styles will surely not be far behind. I've posted about it before, but I always sound like the musician's Stallman )
I'll be practicing with my band no sooner than tomorrow for my own rock show - played in front of tens of people. So can't we all just get along, and buy my t-shirts? ;)
Quite the opposite, actually.
If it rates them high, it means it does a pretty good job of guessing at what kind of tripe the masses'll buy up, which is my understanding of what it's supposed to do
I subscribe to Pandora and I'm outside the US. (I just gave my Dutch postal code in the 'zip code' field, had no problems subscribing.) I guess the 'must be a US resident' requirement is a later addition.
Pandora is fun and I got to know some great bands in the first week, but its choices tend to get repetitive after a while.
JP