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."

Comments

Indie Artists

[punkdigerati]

Can Independant artists who want to see how well their songs are going to do be able to use this software for themselves?

More targetted version

[kebes]

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.

Now If

[miyako]

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.

Re:great...

[rust42]

A (quite successful)songwriter in Australia was recently interviewed and said he had worked out the basics of writing a hit,e.g. so many bars intro, chorus of such and such type etc. and had proved it worked. Now his aim was to write hits and popular songs that fell outside that specification.

Killing art? Not really.

[dex.pdx]

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.

Greg Egan wrote a story somewhat along these lines

[joe user jr]

Excerpt:

When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.

Ok, a little less prosaic than the item under discussion, but an interesting read...

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/