Decoding the Algorithm for Pop Music 353
fb4f writes "Over at Modplug, they have an article describing a mathematical algorithm to predict if a given song will become a hit or not. Paraphrasing the article, a Spanish company called Polyphonic HMI has made a business out of analyzing song submissions and predicting their "hitability". Here's their description of the algorithm and here's their FAQ. They claim to have predicted the commercial success of Norah Jones through this method. Here's my question (which is not fully answered in their FAQ): if they (music company executives) are currently using the algorithm to screen submissions for their "hitability", can we (people who listen to music) use the same algorithm to reject recycled tunes and encourage originality? I for one, still like the fresh talent and community feel of the tracking scene."
Ummm (Score:1, Insightful)
what came first? (Score:5, Insightful)
This company's stuff doesn't do much good when society is bombarded by what the industry wants us to hear.
It becomes a hit because we don't get much of a choice. ClearChannel plays no variety, the non conclomorate channels don't play variety but instead endlessly repeat that they are not owned by ClearChannel and Infinity...
The only way hits can be decided is through freedom of music.
Support those artists that support the free distribution, copying, and playing of their music. Start your searchs at Sharing the Groove [sharingthegroove.com] and FuthurNET [furthurnet.com]
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
They claim that the algorithm is impartial, but we'll have to wait and see if it really is.
Can't be done (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, predicting what will be popular might be very easy.
Next big pop hit = whatever the record companies tell them it will be.
Witness the last American Idol. Who did the sheeple choose? The large black guy, Rueben. Months later, who do you hear the most about? The Howdy Doody lookalike who came in second place, Clay.
"you vill like vhat ve vant, not what you vant!"
Reliability (quote from link) ? (Score:4, Insightful)
It sound like "we found some correlation, but there is data outside the correlation, and sometimes downright anti-correlation between reality and prediction". I think without looking at the data and the real corelation coeficient between "predicting it will be a hit" and "it was a hit" it is difficult to say anything. And even then, correlation between data does not mean there is causal relation, although *pleasing* to the ear is certainly why we hear at music. I think this kleave other factor out. For example the signification of the lyrics. You ear Mozart uniquely for the pure sound pleasantness, but you do not ear some of the rock/pop for its sound only (try it, many of the greatest hit sound "bland" without their lyric).
Plus even if they try to "reassure" customer in their FAQ, if you comapre things to the past and try to reproduce what has the best functionned in the past, then you will never innovate. Which is IMO the biggest problem now (and it feels that new bands/singer are solely choosen on their look, given prefabricated lyric and tune, and marketed as prima dona, instead of having bands/singer raise on their own by the sheer beauty of their music).
People don't want origionality (Score:3, Insightful)
Occassionally there is a blip and people get excited about something. But mostly they are content to wander through life with a catchy tune in their hollow little heads.
Circular logic (Score:3, Insightful)
The algorithm uses the top 30 songs of the last five years as its base of comparison. It then analyzes thousands of songs and determines which ones are most likely to be hits, and those that score best are selectively fed into the market. These songs by necessity become the next set of top 30 hits, and are again used as the algorithm's base of comparison.
So basically, the basis of the system is "these songs will be hits because I say they'll be hits, and I say they'll be hits because they sound like songs that I said would be hits." Isn't this a really, really bad (read: dangerous) case of circular logic?
This is ass-covering for executives.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Well, it bombed in the market, but the software algorithm said it had a chance. I did what the software said was right."
It's your run-of-the-mill corporate bullshit. No creativity, and no real courage to try something different and take a risk.
How do you think we got Milli Vanilli?
The music industry as it is, is little more than a middle-man. Cut them out of the picture, and the consumers benefit, and the REAL artists do too!
Oh come on, this is easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Popularity = k . MarketingBudget
The more they hype it, the more the buying public (increasingly younger teenagers, I wait for the day they get to "pocket-money" kids who simply can't afford it - the industry will implode) will cough up....
Simon the cynic.
Recipe music (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, so far, so good; it sounds like they're saying "good music is good music, and here's a tool for telling whether something is good or not." I'm still skeptical at this point, but it's certainly an interesting idea, and one worthy of study.
But then they completely lose me with this one:
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
They make a high-flown reference to the 36 Plots and other serious attempts at artistic analysis, but that's not what they're actually doing. I do believe that good music is good music, good stories are good stories, etc. I can at least consider seriously the hypothesis that all good art has certain qualities in common, and that by analyzing those qualities we can evaluate a new work's chance of lasting success. But the idea that musicians (or writers, or whatever) can keep pumping out stuff exactly like What's Hot Now and be guaranteed a blockbuster is just stupid.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Recipe music (Score:3, Insightful)
If 'what's hot now' stops selling in large numbers then the algorithm will be adjusted - presumably they keep feeding in the latest songs and their sales volumes.
Algorithm and blues (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this). If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?
Much of the best of 60s pop music was haunted and quirky. That's what happens when the creative is in the lead, rather than the formulaic. Compare the Elizabethan stage. Human expression triumphs when the formulas, while still there for reference, cease to have a stranglehold over production.
Re:it's the other way around (Score:1, Insightful)
There are a few other constraints to lots of pop music:
It must be from 3-4 minutes long. This one is almost completely rigid, completely artificial, and one of my most hated constraints. From my understanding, it had to do with several factors including radio revenue, attention spans, number of songs per album (i.e., LPs). I hate this constraint because lots of songs need time to develop for the artists' intended effect.
The song format is very similar, sometimes marketed to producers entirely around a single hook phrase. There's the obligatory bridge and sometimes a solo to (har har) showcase a singer's or performer's (har har) virtuosity.
Market a song around a hook? Oh yeah. Silly me -- I used to think that you needed a complete song, lyrics, vocals, my amazing guitar work (Spanish, Satriani, Ry Cooder influenced) and cool lyrics (product of a hard life, liberal education, and a mathematics degree). Nope, just a phrase is all you need. Really. Six words is about right. You can quickly build a song around it. Or have them build a song for you to perform...
Metric System Art. (Score:1, Insightful)
TV, Pseudo-Music and other kinds of pseudo-art, pseudo-sports that are watched on tv instead of played, selfhelp "literature", CNN, etc,etc,etc.
Sounds like Matrix ha???. Well
Optimal mathematical patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me get this straight: if a song sounds like a current hit song, it may well be a hit song?
Any this is useful how?
They say they match parameters such as:
- Melody
- Harmony
- Chord progression
- Brilliance
- Fullness of sound
- Beat
- Tempo
- Rhythm
- Octave
- Pitch
This isn't "analysis", it's gross categorization (i.e.:"uptempo pop song in the Michael Bolton vocal style"). It's entirely subjective to the listener - what does "fullness of sound" mean, anyway?Even then, they add this huge disclaimer:
1. The song must be good from an A&R perspective. That is it must sound like a hit song to human ears.
2. It must have optimal mathematical patterns. (that's where this service comes in).
3. It must be promoted well and with an appropriate artist.
Feh. Nothing to see here. If you're interested in real algorithmic analysis, check out David Cope [ucsc.edu].
Rebel to Rebel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Utter garbage. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true in that music has probably had percussion since the start, other then that, total rubbish.
What about music from other cultures? Totally different scales, numbers of notes, structure, the works. You gonna tell a billion Indian's their taste in music is mathematically wrong?
Music is almost 100% relative. It's about painting a psycho acoustic picture inside the listener. Why do certain sounds feel aggressive, well others are soulful? It's 99% arbitrary.
Goodness, in a pop sense, is a matter of painting a picture a whole bunch of people perceive in a similar way. It's a function of civilization, just like any art.
The very thought that you can mathematically write pop songs. People have been trying for awhile. Even if you get an algorithm for a perfect pop song, everyone would get sick of that style and pop would reinvent itself. It's what happens. Hair metal gives way to Grunge. Grunge gives way to Big Beat, Big Beat gives way to nu metal, nu metal gives way to retro-punk. Hip hop does it all within one genera. Street goes to bling, bling goes to conscience, conscience goes to freestyle street and now we got Outkast doing some sort of 70s funk thing doing triple platinum.
The trick isn't writing songs, that's easy, the trick is writing the songs that work nearly universally.
Ask anybody who does it for a living.
Re:it's the other way around (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, I think that the style, and, especially, working out how the style and the underlying melody can be resolved, is as significant an application of artistic talent as writing the melody in the first place. It's like translating poetry; it's easy to do a direct translation, but making it actually work as poetry in the target language is at least as hard as writing the original (since you're constrained not only to write a good poem, but you have to also make it match another work in all of the ways that are important, while using entirely different grammer and vocabulary).
In short, even if classical music tried every melody, the existance of new styles and instrumentations means that there will be new complete works.
No, it's not up to you. (Score:3, Insightful)
No. You don't have a say in this and you know it. Why ask? The industry is fueled by american teenagers. They aren't the wisest shoppers, nor the most picky. Give them a set of boobies to admire and some bling bling to think about and out come the $20's.
An example: Brittney Spear's popularity. 12 magazine covers and over 20 tv appearances this month alone. Who reading this actually buys her CDs? Probably not many, she's a manufactured star for highschool kids.
I do wish the sound of a 'band' would become popular again. It seems like ever since the alternative explosion in the early 90's every white-bread band has to sound the same. Can one male singer (not hiphop) NOT sing through his nose for a song or two? That, and the heroin voice (ie. Faith No More) is so damn overdone. What are we up to now? 5 or 6 top 40 bands that might as well have the same vocalist and guitarist? There must be some algorythm that picks up on this in the 'hitability' analysis.
This isn't anything new, I guess. It's like that Monkies tv show modelled after the Beatles. Except now, it's not a tv show and it's got a lot of re-runs.
Re:My Pop Music Algorithm (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:And what about hip-hop/rap? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a younger listener, I was well aware of rap music, but it sort of cornered its own market and stayed there. I don't think anyone was prepared for, or could of predicted the massive influx of rap/hip-hop into the mainstream. Personally, it's not my bag of tea (little music is these days). And personally, I don't see what's so prolific about it, other than the fact that a good portion of it has a *very* raw, rebellious overtone that is, for whatever reason, favored by youth. But it's there, it has a huge market, and I find it interesting, if for no other reason than to admire the degree of influence it has had.
Given this, I'm not sure there is any algorithm that can predict what people will decide they like at any given point, as there are so many dynamics at work. As others have pointed out, there is definitely the chance that our music-buying preferences are being manipulated by those at the top telling us what we like. But there are also others - the infamous "what are my friends listening to" I-gotta-be-like-everyone-else mentality. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention another significant consideration, at least with respect to the most of the popular artists: Is there any money in it?
Re:Can't be done (Score:2, Insightful)
White chocolate is cocoa butter mixed in with milk solids, vegetable fat, and sugar.
But what makes someone black? or white? Skin color? Common values? Shared experiences?
Democrats and "black leaders" claim that Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice or Clarence Thomas are black in skin color only - that is, to be black, you can't be successful or a (**shudder**) republican, and anyone who has a different point of view is just another Uncle Tom working for the man.
Is OJ Simpson black? His skin color is, but he played golf, married white models, and lived in houses that most slashdot readers could never afford.
And Michael Jackson? He doesn't look black. He's had his nose, cheeks, and chin surgically enhanced to look white. He lives in a 12-million dollar house, and at one point had a net worth of $750 million dollars.
A lot of people use race as a dividing line. Race isn't the problem, it's poverty and lack of education, and those problems aren't exclusive to any race.
Re:Can't be done (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not sure I can totally disagree with that. However, it is not because of racism, I think it is more because black people tend to gather around black culture. I think many blacks would fear being labeled as an oreo or some other such divisive label if they, for example, embraced punk rock.
Just as an interesting view (not intended to be racist at all), the audiences for our college basketball games is overwhelmingly white, yet the players are all black. Is there any event where the centers of attention are mostly white, but the audience is almost overwhelmingly black?
The point being, I think it is not whites that stop blacks from being part of the popular (non r&b/rap) music scene as it is themselves not wanting to embrace "white" music (which is something that doesn't really exist anymore, outside of classical music, given how pervasive the effects of jazz have become). I honestly don't care what race the musicians belongs to, I just want good music (increasingly difficult to find in pop). Once again, this was not intended to be racist, but I know whenever race is brought up it can bring forth strong emotions
--Joey
Endless Repetition (Score:4, Insightful)
The software thats been cooked basically gives record execs another means of increasing their hit:miss ratio.
So think of it this way, the RIAA claims that they charge high prices to make up for all the flops. They now have a new means to weed out the money wasters. Profit goes up, prices go down... right?
Whar about certain "classics" which were not hits? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder how the HMI system will cope with these two different cases. Maybe it will group potential classics with existing classics. Maybe classics are songs which have some unique quality which make them stand out in the collective consciousness of the music-listening public and therefore remain popular. (Bohemian Rhapsody springs to mind)
Re:And my question ... (Score:1, Insightful)