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Music Media

Using Fractals To Classify Music 164

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-just-for-pretty-pictures-any-more dept.
Brian McLaughlin writes "A company is working on software that can classify music with fractals and make it easier to find the tunes you want on the Web. Apparently, one can detect the type of music (jazz, heavy-metal, in-between, etc.) by detecting fractal patterns in the music."." I'm looking forward to the day when my music can be indexed and crossreferenced every which way: artist, tempo, year, style, similiarity, heck I wanna know when the Beastie Boys sample The Beatles and be notified and give the option to follow up on the samples within the songs. Someday... I hope.
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Using Fractals to Classify Music More

Using Fractals to Classify Music

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  • How can you laud this kind of insult to music? I am utterly insulted by the idea that you could reduce a great art form like music to little numbers and digits. So I suppose we can just forget about all the creativity and emotion that are infused into the works of a musician and classify it as something soulless and robotic like math?

    Music may have scientific properties, but it is by no means simply a matter of equations and numbers! Music takes passion, emotion, and raw humanity to exist as such, not a series of bits and bytes! I suppose someone is going try to make a arbitrary music writing program based on this info , no? Well, if so, I'd just like to say that music is NOT math. Unlike math, which takes no feeling or creativity whatsoever (rather robotic computational ability, seeing as how our advanced graphing calculators could easily take the place of any well known mathematician), music requires soul and humanity... something which a computer can never create. A program would never compensate for the genius of Mozart or Bach. Leave it to dronelike programmers to try to rob another great art of its soul and wonder by reducing it to a series of computational processes.

  • i posted up something earlier about this...there is a program called metasynth (i think its mac only, not usre though, only heard of in The Wire, british avant rock/electronica magazine) where you can input a JPEG ar any image, and it createsa asound based on the visual image. pretty cool stuff, never heard of it anywhere else though.

    ickyickyicky icky pi-tang woop grrlblrlllbburllllll....woop auuwwww ....mumble

  • When Metallica told Napster to ban 300K users, it was because of a filename which does not infringe on copyright.

    Proof please? You need to provide proof to backup this outrageous claim. For starters, they did not prosecute users who were trading concert versions of the songs. If they just searched for keywords, how would they have weeded these out? Please provide proof as a documented source that they used keywords as a sole means of monitoring the users.

  • Along this line, you could also tell your player to play other songs with similar fractal signatures to the song you are currently listening to, if you want to hear MORE songs like it - or the exact opposite, play songs which have greatly different fractal signatures, if you want a greatly varying selection of music.

  • Same for most classical, country and pop.

    Oh man. This post is documented proof of the failure of America's education system. Wow. Most classical fans can pinpoint the composer and piece (out of a repertoire which is about 100 times as big and diverse as pop/industrial/country/goth/punk/metal conglomerate) in seconds, because the music is so distinctive. The clueless masses just hear a bunch of violins and think it's all the same, because they are not properly educated to differentiate it. Pathetic.

  • OK, it seems that the sum total of all these posts (aside from the "music is my soul and not math" troll) is that what we all really want is our own personal soundtracks that we don't even want to have to play with. We just want to push a button or two and have the right music come out all the time...

    I just gotta ask.... do we REALLY want this? I mean, in our house is one thing, I suppose (although what if you live other people who don't necessarily feel your mood?), but nothing ever stops at the house. Next thing people will want is for it to link to their car stereos, walkmen, etc... a situation which leads me to two consequences

    1: Actual human contact will be really annoying. Both of you will have to shout over your respective soundtracks to actually communicate. Or, god forbid, turn them way down, or even off. Plus, imagine the irritation when the guy you nearly ran down honks at you, interrupting your favorite song!

    2: It's possible that creativity will be stifled. How? Well, this seems like it would knock music radio way down the charts. After all, why listen to ads or songs you don't like? So that outlet for new music would be gone. Where would people hear new music, then? It would have to travel by word of mouth, and that could take forever...

    Anyway, just my $.02. Is this a future that we want, or am I just dreaming? (Gawd, that sounds like one of the awful trolls from the ZDNet authors....)

  • Damn straight! I don't know how anyone could claim that all classical music is the same. It just goes to show you how low are society has sunk.
  • A fellow named Forte promoted a music classification system based on "tone vectors" during the late 70s and early 80s. While useful, in some people's view, for classifying atonal music, the sytem had an interesting side-effect.

    All major modes and all minor modes were classified by the same vector. According to Forte, most western music was the same.
  • So apparently your judging rap, pop, country, classical, etc... from your limited contact with them via Radio? mp3.com? what...? All music has crap in it, but every style has some gems... a few quick examples Underground Hip Hop (anti pop consortium, mos def) Country music (johnny cash, bob dylan) Pop Music (talking heads/david byrne, Pizzicato 5) Classical (Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Bartok) whatever... open your mind...
  • Much of Schoenberg's music is painful, but some is beautiful such as Verklarte Nacht. Pierrot Lunaire is very listenable as well, but not really beutiful. A lot of his other stuff is really painful, and I'm ve been trying to listen to it for years without success. Maybe someday! They said it took the world almost a hundred years to digest Beethoven's late string quartets, which are now considered some of the best music ever composed, so we have time with Schoenberg yet.
  • Merzbow
  • Damn, wish I hadn't posted now, so I could mod this guy up.
  • I was thinking the same thing.

    If you can classify genre and style using fractals, why can't you reverse the process and make a fractal sequencer or drum/rhythm machine?

  • And surely someone is eventually going to try to write his own program to arbitrarily generate music based on a mathematical level, thus depriving the music of any soul or feeling.

    Mozart did this, actually. Well... not a program, since computers weren't invented yet, but still. What he designed was a set of algorithms -- a dice game -- that one could use to assemble compositions from thematic "primitives".

    A number of people have since implemented it in software. I suspect Mozart would be a hacker if he were alive today.

  • This isn't about the generation of music, but about the categorization of music by fractals. Anyway, modern music is more complicated than the simple scales.
  • ........but the Beasties did rip off a Beatles guitar lick for "Egg Raid On Mojo", one of their earliest punk songs. It's available on the original PollyWogStew EP, Some Old Bullsh*t, and the sounds of science compilation. One of my favourite Beastie tunes. I remember freaking out when one of my buddies played me the original Beatles tune......very similar, might as well have been sampled.

  • Re:CDDB (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I agree, CDDB is kinda neat, but I usually know what CD I'm putting in the drive, so it's not much of a help other than filling in the names of the tracks. On the other hand, if it were to provide information about guests on certain tracks or where samples (if any) were taken from I think it could be a good learning tool for people who are interested, and might help enlighten a few people who otherwise wouldn't really know what they're listening too. Often I hear songs where I recognize things like old BB King samples and what not. I just heard a teeny-pop song yesterday where the entire backing track throughout the whole song is from an old John Melloncamp tune but I'll bet a lot of the target audience won't have a clue what it really is until their parents (gasp!) say, hey that sounds just like...
  • I can already see the practical applications of this.. Next to the speed and quality requirement settings in Napster, there will be 'music type', 'sounds like' and 'doesn't sound like' entry boxes..

    This way Napster can really be a way of finding new artists, try searching for a symphonic rock band that doesn't sound like Metallica, for instance. Or female pop singers that doesn't sound like Brittney Spears.

    This could also be a way to avoid misnamed files. Of course, this probably won't be possible until in a few years, when Napster has been sued into oblivion by the Evil Corporations(TM) anyway.
    --

  • While the idea itself sounds interesting, how accurate can this really be, given the complexity of music and the quantity of cross-genre stuff being put out? It all seems vaguely reminiscent of the Censorware skin-tone heuristic, if slightly more legit. The question is how long before Metallica, Dr. Dre, etc. will want to use this to screen their music out, or before I can get a napster client that screens out the "crap" genre.

    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war!
  • What happens if you feed that program disimilar styles of music, say Metalica, Portishead, and Beatovens 9th?

    Also, if I feed the same songs in again do I get the same song out the system a second time, or is it just the same song as the first time?

  • Sample database (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to http://www.samplespotter.com: The Beastie Boys sample five Beatles songs in the track "Sounds of Science". They are: Back in the USSR, Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise), The End, and When I'm 64.
  • Amen to that!

    wrighty.

  • Touching on the fingerprinting idea, this could be a great tool for setting up some kind of napster-like/micropayment system. Just before you're about to download from someone's computer, a fractal fingerprint (as described in the above post) can be taken of the file and compared to a central (but possibly mirrored) database of fingerprints. A match in the database would initiate a micropayment to take place. So instead of generating micropayments based upon filename (which could be fscked by calling a file Metallika instead of Metallica), you're doing it by the information actually contained in the file.

    This assumes that the fingerprints would be unique for each song. To get around making matches, however, a clever fellow might add some noise to the end of the file which would prevent a match/micropayment from being made. To counter this, the artist or a representative of the artist would have to scour this napster-like system for such files and add the fingerprints of those files to the database.


  • I wonder what Fourier transforms of music would tell us. I know they are important in image recognition. Let's see:

    Music is made up of notes. Notes have pitch (frequency), dynamics (amplitude), and tamber (noise?). Different notes are played at the same time, and so their equations add up. There is also tempo, so these equations are changing with time. A local approximation would easily be made by a Fourier series since the sound is repeating (if I play an `A' on a violin, it will have a continuous sound). This should transfer over fairly well to...oh never mind, let's just fft the whole thing and see what we get.

  • Re:Reverse (Score:3)

    by Kaufmann ( 16976 ) <rnedal&olimpo,com,br> on Friday August 04, 2000 @09:45AM (#880170) Homepage
    What happens if you feed that program disimilar styles of music, say Metalica, Portishead, and Beatovens 9th?

    It fails to find any kind of meaningful consistency, the ATN's knowledge base becomes underpopulated, and the final product is utterly bland and devoid of content. (Wow, so that's how they compose new songs for Britney Spears records!)

    By the way... Beatovens? That's a damned cool name for a band! I've got dibs on it!

    Also, if I feed the same songs in again do I get the same song out the system a second time, or is it just the same song as the first time?

    No, the generative part of the process is randomised, so you merely get a different song in the same style. Look at the example MIDIs in the EMI web pages; there are a handful of generated Nocturnes in there, IIRC, and they're all different.

  • Coulnd't believe that race kept requesting the doctor to sing everything. With the rest of the opera singers out there, hes definately on a par with Vanilla Ice.
  • If this system of fractal categorization becomes customary in the age of mp3's, a whole new world of genre labeling will spawn. This can only be a good thing and will dimish the moot arguments of "NO! this is ambience not trance!!" "NO! its blue grass not redneck jazz(hehe)" simply because it can be mathematically proven with some eye candy that is finally worthy of being in the movie Hackers (the most accurate hacker movie of all time.) Music by definition [dictionary.com] is:

    The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.

    which dumbed down is manipulation of frequencies and amplitues (et al) so therefore computated labels can be generated.

    This will also allow artists to break free from a single label because their various songs will advertantly or inadvertantly fit into their various genres. (as well as correctly label the new mtv shit band forcing them to realize they are in fact shit, manufactured by corporate bigheads looking to destroy the meaning of music: and NO N'Sync, you are NOT the next Beatles mislabled as a boy-band. The Beatles never wore silver, light reflecting, winsheild visors as clothing)

  • Stuff like CDDB could be built upon and used to store meta-inofrmation of this kind. Pretty cool if you ask me. XML will be the tool of choice.
  • everything is mathmatizable. any finite (i'll say, to play it safe) set of data can be modelled. somebody above made the good point that sheet music is essentially a calculational reduction of music. does it seem so strange that, given a piece of music, you would be able distinguish debussy from lennon? nobody is saying that music IS math; someone has just discovered an interesting and useful map. this map is hardly unique.

    and that thing about math being devoid of feeling? so wrong. i hope you don't actually believe that. it may be accurate to say that adding your phone and electric bills requires no soul. this has, roughly, the musical equivilent of, say, the C major scale played at 100mm. but to say that math is unfeeling, just because you don't like to do your taxes is saying that music is unfeeling based on your opinion of the C scale. math is an aesthetic discipline with criteria for beauty that differ from person to person. unfortunately, the more beautiful pieces of mathematics are inaccessible to anyone but a specialist. a great thing about music is that listening to it requires no training.

    and a great thing about math is that you can use it to do your taxes.

  • ...If you can generate music with fractals, why not classify it? The only question then is how to do smaller differentials - punk vs. ska vs. reggae, ambient vs. jungle vs. rotterdam... I know some people that take this stuff *WAAAAY* too far.

  • Better yet, when a band is making an album of their songs, or a record company is putting together a `best of' type album, this analysis could help make sure compatable songs get put next to each other. For symphonies written in the classical era, there is a set pattern of key changes and such that keep a listener interested by providing new material without having completely contrasting musical ideas thus confusing the listener (like many modern symphonies). I'm sure this already happens in albums (I imagine fast songs are intersperced with slow songs for instance). Perhaps this would do a better job than actually having to think (like listening to MIDI...)

  • now thats a kewl link! thank you!
  • I'm sure that once this gets around, some artists are going to try for odd effects that sound like a mix of heavy-metal and classical or something.
    --
  • Of course, they could also use my technique. DL part of the music (~10 seconds worth) & listen to it; if it's what you're looking for, keep DLing. If it isn't, cancel it. They probably know what their recorded music sounds like, so they could listen to that little bit & identify the CD version; heck, if they vary their music, they may even be able to tell which CD it came from (like I can do for some of the music I listen to.
  • I'm looking forward to the day when my music can be indexed and crossreferenced every which way: artist, tempo, year, style, similiarity, heck I wanna know when the Beastie Boys sample The Beatles and be notified

    This is a little disturbing to me. Is it really necessary to reduce music to a series of mathematic calculations? Is that really what the aim is? Besides, after that, how far away are we from randomly generated songs (not midi) based on your preferences? That would totally ruin music as an art form, and stifle real creativity. I think this would increase the problem of people just sticking with what they know and not experiencing radically new types of music.

    Of course, having hold of this kind of personal preference data is a record exec's dream, so I doubt this company would have any trouble getting funding. Imagine if you could record a song, instantly check it against the personal taste database of 10 million teenagers, and then adjust the song accordingly. What a nightmare.

    - Scott


    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • This sounds like a technological urban legend to me.

    Note that radio frequencies are in the MILLIONS of cycles per second, wheras acoustic frequencies are TENS to THOUSANDS. The resultant frequency modulations would be almost entirely imperceptible on the scale of the FM band, over many MHz. Indeed, the way modern radio systems encode and decode the signal is through the use of heterodyne techniques; the signal is essentially detected as interference "beats" against a standard frequency reference.

    Best,

    Bob
  • My youngest brother wrote a program to do this, in Z80 Assembler, including a very nicely coded Fast Fourier Transform. It ran on a Sinclair Spectrum, and the music was fed in via the tape interface. This was at least ten years ago. As I remember, Vanilla Fudge was really easy to detect...
  • Somehow I doubt that one can distinguish the fractal differences between two totally different songs taht have similar bass hits... Beethoven's 5th symphony and any deftones song share a bss similarity...
  • The big question is, will Metallica sue them for making it easier to find their music online?

    I sense much NT in you.
    NT leads to bluescreen,
    bluescreen leads to downtime,

  • Such Classification... (Score:3)

    by suwalski ( 176418 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:35AM (#880185)
    Such Classification could also be used to detect the type of music you want to hear on a mix. For example:

    Let's say you make yourself a bunch of mix CDs and stick them into your 200-CD tray (it makes more sense to have an MP3 player, but hey...), and from those CDs you only want to hear techno, or only want classical because your parents are coming for dinner. The auto-detection functions allow for limitless possibilities for music playback.

    Maybe this could also be used on TV to filter out stuff you don't want to see? Like a quick auto-seek for a channel that doesn't have a cxommercial running?!
  • OK, who also clicked on the 'Group Sex' item next to this article??...Only to find out it was to do with gene therapy.

    Well I was dissapointed :-)
  • You might find this bit [userfriendly.org] off of #userfriendly funny in the context of pop music...
  • Heh, I guess you've never heard of The Great Kat [greatkat.com]. Her version of Rossini's "William Tell Overture" is surprisingly good. In the past, she's covered Sarasate, Vivaldi, Wagner, Paganini, Bach, and Beethoven. Her original compositions pretty much suck ass, though.

  • I'd like to see this go even further where computers placed around your home can pick up on your mood, and play the appropriate background music. I can definitely see this happening in a few years... vulgrin the MAD
  • Dman33:
    This is cool technology though...maybe someday we will be able to prove for certain that Vanilla Ice did use David Bowie and Queen's 'Under Pressure' in 'Ice Ice Baby'.

    If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

    QED

    John
  • You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard.

    You've never listened closely to Bill Evans, then. He played (jazz piano) in a manner that would be nearly impossible even to get on sheet music, let alone reproduce from the sheet music.

    Transcribe a solo by one of the great jazz masters. Doesn't matter who. Bill Evans, Monk, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt. Doesn't matter. Now feed it into your nearest MIDI program. Play it alongside the original. Gee, doesn't sound so good now, does it? And that's not just because it's not on a real instrument. It's because it's not played by a real musician.

    For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.

    Chess is, by its nature, not a creative act. It's a logic game with a well-defined objective. What's the objective of music? What are the rules?

  • Finally found one of my pals that remembered this thing:

    "The first tuner to use an oscilloscope for display of information was a tube model, the Marantz Model Ten. Beautiful device, tubes. The designer was Dick Sequerra. Later, he started his own firm, his tuners branded under his last name. They displayed the whole spectrum and were popular with radio stations. They are still being made by another company under the same name. Most expensive model about $10k."

    I think this is a photo of it [mat-hifi.co.jp], but I'm not sure. Still looking.

  • Mixing heavy metal and classical isn't really odd. Yngvie Malmsteen put the mainstream spotlight on it for a while in the 80s, and there was also a big revival of neo-classic metal in the late 90s. Happy Helloween-style power metal fused seamlessly with classical on albums like Rhapsody's "Legendary Tales", and darker heavier more traditional metal (think 80s Metallica or Megadeth) combined very well with classical on Rage's "XIII". Then there's the weirder stuff like Therion or Nightwish who have fused metal with opera, or even middle-eastern folk music. I'm just listing the more popular stuff; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

    It has even become so common and popular that some diehards are starting to think of it as being "trendy" so there's some backlash against it now. This only got worse when the mainstream alterna-pop band formerly known as Metallica attempted (poorly) to jump on the bandwagon and follow the trend with their S&M album. (Fortunately they didn't know what they were doing so the damage of the movement's credibility was minimal.)

    But anyway, metal and classical go very well together. Some people way Wagner (the "Flight of the Valkyries" guy) was a headbanger at heart. ;-)


    ---
  • I dont really think that you can make a judgement on an education system based on music education. personally I dont really think that music education is all that important, maybe not in public education anyway, classical music doesn't interest me and anything that I might have been tought in high school I would have forgotten the by now. Music is something that should be left for ones own to figure out...
    I do not really understand why I should learn to be able to differentiate between composers and pieces...
    How is it really going to help me?
  • Decibels are ratios between two levels, such as the amplitude of sound waves. Here are some relevant links and some excerpts I found using Google. The first explains the meaning in electronics, and the second is more about sound: [ac6v.com] The decibel, or dB, is a means of expressing the gain of an active device (such as an amplifier) or the loss in a passive device (such as an attenuator or length of cable). It is simply the ratio of output to input expressed in logarithmic form [whatis.com] The decibel (abbreviated as dB, and also as db and DB) is a common unit of measurement for the relative loudness of a sound or, in electronics, for the relative difference between two power levels. A decibel is one-tenth of a "Bel", a seldom-used unit named for Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. In sound, the difference between two sound levels is ten times the common logarithm of the ratio of their power levels. In sound, decibels measure a scale from the threshold of human hearing, 0 dB, upward towards the threshold of pain, about 120-140 dB. As examples: the sound level in the average residential home is about 40 dB, average conversation is about 60 dB, typical home music listening levels are about 85 dB, a loud rock band about 110 dB, and a jet engine close up is 150dB.
  • And don't forget Ritchie Blackmore, who has been fusing hard rock and classical for about thirty years, starting (I think) with Deep Purple's Concerto For Group And Orchestra. Blackmore and Lord both put classical solos in the live shows.

    Several of the tracks on Malmsteen's _Inspiration_ cd are DP or Rainbow, which brings this a little closer to metal, anyway.

    And there's always Lost In Twilight, a super-fast classicalish metal band on MP3.com.

  • Candlemass?
    Apocalyptica?

    Don't forget Symphony&Metallica. Speaking as a classical musician who's recently been turned on to metal, I've found that the two genres are pretty stylistically similar to begin with. Aside from style, they're also similar in that they're both a lot more concerned with artistry than other kinds of music, which mostly focus on gut-level entertainment at the expense of all artistic value.

    I can see how people who don't listen actively to music might think that metal and classical are totally dissimilar, because the instrumentation is so different. But really listening to music is more than just hearing it in the background--it's paying attention, searching for patterns and hidden similarities. If you listen for those things, you find that instrumentation is one of the only differences between metal and classical. I consider metal to be more related to classical than it is to rock/pop, even.

    But hell do I love it!
    Amen to that!

  • There's a TuneServer [ira.uka.de] in Germany that works on the principle of whether the pitch rises or falls with each note. It claims to analyse wav files of whistling (a lot simpler than mp3s of full instrumentation).

    It's based on a book published by G Spencer Brown [robotwisdom.com], the mathematical logician (Laws of Form).

  • How can you laud this kind of insult to music? I am utterly insulted by the idea that you could reduce a great art form like music to little numbers and digits.

    So you're saying numbers, digits, and mathematics are devoid of all beauty and interest? As a computer scientist and accomplished musician, I am insulted by the idea that they are unrelated.

    Would you say that nature is devoid of beauty and interest? That nature lacks creativity and soul? Why, the very digits and numbers you are attacking are in fact only mathematical descriptions of natural patterns found in every aspect of nature. Mathemeticians and their calculators (show me a calculator that could have done Newton's work) strive to describe and understand nature, as do all scientists. Invariably their research can only deepen our understanding and appreciation for the beauty around us.

    I am an organist, and I am filled with a thrilling sensation when I play the music of J.S. Bach. Bach music is beautiful music. You obviously don't understand the intricacies and complexity of great music such as Bach's. If you did you would immediately see the relation between music and math, and the value of studying music in a scientific manner.

    That said, you are right. Music is more than just equations and numbers. But the scientific study of music will ultimately only bring us more beautiful music. Even computer-generated music! You might argue that computer-generated music could never rival a true musician in performance and creativity. You might be right. (Data's recitals in Star Trek: The Next Generation come to mind) But as we listen to and recognize the differences and similarities, our appreciation for the music we get from the true musician can only be heightened!

    As an example, I cite Dave Brubeck's classic album, Time Out. Go check it out from the library, or even better go buy it. Read what Dave, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, has to say about music and math. Take Five, the most popular song from that album and one of the most popular jazz tunes ever, is basically a mathematical drum solo.

    Please, do not let your ignorance of a subject close your mind. Historically the greatest obstacle to both music and science has been a closed mind.

  • It's not quite the same, but the Ultimate Band List [ubl.com] won a Webby award for music and has long been accepted as the One True Oracle for music information. Like IMDB (owned by Amazon) it's now more commercial, with "buy this!" links littered all over the place, but it still has decent information.

  • Hmm... (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    If you can classify music with fractals, and you can generate music with fractals...

    Could you fuse categories of music as well?

    That is, if you can detect the unique patterns of, say, hip-hop, or classical music, could you feed that back into a program and get some really funky classical music? :)

    This is all pure speculation on my part, mind you. I'd love to help program something like this, but I wouldn't know where to start. I know something about fractals, but very little about music.

    (or at least I'm not any good--whatever program I came up with would compose better than I would!)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • How can you laud this kind of insult to music? I am utterly insulted by the idea that you could reduce a great art form like music to little numbers and digits. So I suppose we can just forget about all the creativity and emotion that are infused into the works of a musician and classify it as something soulless and robotic like math?

    Well, it works for putting music on CDs, doesn't it?

  • Reverse (Score:5)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:40AM (#880203)
    Couldn't the reverse, then be done, to take a fractal "fingerprint" of a type of music (say, jazz), add some variables and come up with original music?
  • Leave it to dronelike programmers to try to rob another great art of its soul and wonder by reducing it to a series of computational processes.

    Hmm. I take it you don't listen to MP3s, then.

  • Like so many announcements, this one is short on details. But music has lots of interesting features which suggest that fractal analysis is a useful start.

    Anyone who has browsed through the various Fractal books which actually give you some of the maths, such as the Science of Fractal Images (pub Springer-Verlag) will have noticed the revelation that almost all music has a 1/f^(1-\beta) power spectrum, which is the what fractal approximations to Fractal Brownian Motion tend to head for.

    While fractals are supposed to have self similar detail at all levels, and music, digitised or otherwise clearly cannot have 'detail' at all levels for physical or sampling constraint reasons, this doesn't necessarily invalidate the analysis either. The question therefore is what sorts of characteristics are they using as musical indicators. Distinguishing classical from pop is relatively easy even without fractal analysis - the frequency range visited by classical music can be several octaves greater given some reasonable threshold value. The value of \beta may give some insight between styles - estimates for \beta can be as simple as 'distance' travelled by the actual line divided by time, with appropriate normalisation. Anyone care to suggest others? No reason why we shouldn't try and get something working for say CDDB as someone suggested.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Flamebait?

    I'd like to see someone "generate" something like old Neil Young, Violent Femmes, Mark Knopfler, Junior Wells, etc.

    On the other hand, I can see this as an accurate description of MIDI. :)

  • As a researcher [ucsd.edu] in pattern recognition who also manages a band [earthride.com], this topic holds particular interest for me.

    I haven't read the article but it would surprise me if this method was more effective than a frequency/power spectrum (the distribution of sound energy over all frequencies) or even a basic neural net classifier (both mentioned by previous commentors) at stylistic classification of music. Fractal dimension reduces the whole waveform to a single number; a frequency/power spectrum contains a lot more information. (For the fractally challenged: a straight line has a dimension of 1, and a solid plane a dimension of 2; a music waveform has some fractional dimension between 1 and 2... it's roughly a measure of the regular "squiggliness" of the waveform. Fractal dimension is not necessarily a measure of self similarity as is implied by the news brief; it's just that the self similar patterns that we popularly call "fractals" have an interesting fractal dimension, like 2 2/3 or something.)

    I think music recognition technology is the key to resolving the conflict between artists who want to make money off their recordings and fans who want to sample a wide variety. It's a tough business folks; Metallica doesn't deserve much sympathy but most bands are extremely exploited by record companies and deserve to make as much money as possible off their art. Someday releasing a record will also entail releasing a host of net-bots that look for unauthorized, publicly available copies of the music.

    Stylistic classification is not that hard. Much harder is reliably recognizing a particular piece of music (i.e. creating a bot that scours the net, looking for copies of "Master of Puppets"). It's easy to fool a frequency power spectrum classifier, for example, by tacking on some tones to the end of the track, or reequalizing the track, or adding some low frequency inaudible noise.

    This is where AI steps in. The biggest feather in the cap of AI is the technology used in 95% of all speech recognition systems: Hidden Markov Models (they are probabilistic versions of deterministic finite state automata, for those geeks out there who have been subjected to the torture of a class in computer science theory). The same technology can be used to identify pieces of music.

  • Try this link [worldvillage.com] for Mozart's musical dice game as a CGI program, along with the rules and a bit of background on the whole thing.

    Enjoy :-)
  • When he finished, he realized that the comments were much, much longer than the code they attempted to describe.

    (Oddly enough, I just had a similar discussion in DALNet #perl. I'll be a good programmer, then, and practice code (example) reuse.)

    I remember that post on PM too; I disprove it thus.

    "This is left as an exercise to the reader": write a Perl module Math::MB, such that, after

    use Math::MB;
    tie($m, 'Math::MB');

    $t contains the Mandelbrot set. The length of Math::MB must be strictly smaller than the following description of the Mandelbrot set:

    Definition. Let Z_1_(c) = 1, Z_n_(c) = Z_n-1_(c)^2 + c; then M = { c e |C | lim_n->oo_ Z_n_(c) * oo }.

    (_foo_ denotates a subscript; oo denotates infinity.)

    (Thus it is proved that, however concise Perl may be, mathematics is even more so. ;) Seriously, even if I expand the above formula to its textual correspondent, it'd still be much shorter than it could be expressed in any algorithmic language, because these are languages for computation, not for mathematical abstraction.

    My point is that the same thing applies to poetry. It shouldn't be described in terms of the pure textual size of its written form, but in terms of the "size" of the symbolic structure that the reader gathers from reading it. Perl can represent, e.g., pattern-matching, array looping and I/O, concisely because that's all that a Perl program does; there's no additional level of significance to the "text" that is Perl code, so the issue is merely one of Perl syntax vs. English syntax. However, ideas that are easily expressed in a "real" language like English, to a human, such as the concept of limits, the concept of a set, and the concept of a logic variable, have no reasonable equivalent in Perl programming.

    Thus, Perl may be beautiful, but it's no poetry. ;)

  • No, they might use it! (Score:4)

    by Dman33 ( 110217 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:43AM (#880227)
    Actually, this could be used to shoot down the popular "filename says sandman, but is not metallica" arguments. When Metallica told Napster to ban 300K users, it was because of a filename which does not infringe on copyright. Now a band can say, "Hey, not only does it have a suspicious filename, but it follows the pattern of our hit song exactly.

    This is cool technology though...maybe someday we will be able to prove for certain that Vanilla Ice did use David Bowie and Queen's 'Under Pressure' in 'Ice Ice Baby'. Hmmm
  • CDDB^2 [cddb.com] has some support for this, and other neat things like song lyrics etc..

    No linux software that supports it yet though, and to get the Developers Kit or use the database you have to sign a nauseatingly restrictive 16-page PDF agreement and fax it back to them, and even then you can only let a maximum of 100 people use the application until the CDDB people has tested your application and found it worthy.

    FreeDB [freedb.org]^2, anyone?
    --

  • They've changed their name to Gracenote [gracenote.com]. This is mainly just a way to relaunch their brand since they now work on more than CD's - hence the old name is too restrictive...

  • ~95%, in my experience (Score:4)

    by J.J. ( 27067 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @04:02AM (#880234)
    It's actually not that difficult. The algorithim (that I know) is a fairly straightforward neural network. I took an Intro to AI class while I was in college - had a friend who's final project was a system that could determine the type of music on a CD that was currently in his CDROM drive.

    He trained it first, with 2 CDs from each genre from his collection. He then went through and had the system analyze and 'guess' the type of music. From his collection of ~100 CDs, it correctly identified the different types about 95% of the time.

    Now, I don't know the constraints that these folks are putting on their software. But if Erik could code up a working model for a 200 level AI class, I'd hope that this company can handle details.

    JJ
  • Actually, the burden of proof is on Metallica.. They have to prove that the users were infringing on the copyright and failed to do so.
    I am talking about when Metallica's net detective firm (the name escapes me) approached Napster with 300,000 userids and said "Ban these users". The burden of proof is on the side of the complaintant, not on the service provider (Napster) But that is all old news now...

  • Re:Proof (Score:3)

    by mrogers ( 85392 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @06:41AM (#880240)
    My favourite music is Einstuerzende Neubauten, and anything else just isn't noise.
  • I take it you've never heard of David Cope's work. Cope is a rather well-known contemporary composer, as well as a great computer scientist in his field. He has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) [ucsc.edu], based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).

    Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style, it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.

    Sure, music has "soul"; it just so happens that this "soul" is mathematically representable. That doesn't make it any less important.

  • Re:Proof? (Score:4)

    by VAXman ( 96870 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @06:45AM (#880242)
    Any music which you are not familiar with will sound "all the same" until you are familiar with it. People have said that about jazz, pop, classical, heavy metal, techno, hip hop, punk - anything in existence. If you think any genre "sounds all the same", I submit that you are not familiar enough with it to be able to understand what the different artists are trying to achieve. I would say that you need to be familiar with at least 100 recordings of a genre, and have read several books about it, before you are qualified to even begin considering judging it.

    Something like country is tremendously diverse, and is also one of the oldest recorded musics. Few music lovers don't love older country to begin with, and when you add things like alt.country and bluegrass and contry-folk (each of which have a bunch of different sub-genres), you have a tremedously respectable music, and inarguarbly one of American's two or three finest traditions.

    Of course, if all you've heard is Shania Twain and whatever else they play on the radio, you've missed out. Like any genre, the best country music is not played on the radio. Judging country music by Garth Brooks makes about as much sense as judging jazz by hearing only Kenny G, metal by only Bon Jovi, rap by only Snoop Dogg, and classical only by Charlotte Church. For any genre you need to dig deeper than the tunes played on the radio, and country (and hip-hop, and jazz, and ...) are no different.


  • Based on what the article says, I'd expect Torn and Eno to be lumped in with Yanni and Tesh. The "amplitude fractals"--or whatever they're calling them--would be about the same.

    But, if they combined the amplitude analysis with something that could determine harmonic relationships between simultaneously occurring tones, they might spot the difference (Eno and Torn being "uglier" to most people's ears, because they use more complex, close-on-the-scale voicings, generally). But it still wouldn't know the difference between the new Deftones album and the second Sunny Day Real Estate record, based on that.

    So, if you can hear the difference between, say, John Fahey and Roy Clark, something like this would be useless to you. Probably a near-"true AI" problem, if they were bothering to get it right (like, identifying the guys in Birdsongs as members of Mission of Burma based on their styles). Which they aren't. They're just whoring for VCs by using obfuscatory tech-talk to hide the uselessness of their allegedly existing product.

  • Re:Reverse (Score:3)

    by Kaufmann ( 16976 ) <rnedal&olimpo,com,br> on Friday August 04, 2000 @06:51AM (#880244) Homepage
    Been there, done that. David Cope has devised a symbolic AI program in Lisp called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) [ucsc.edu], based on the linguistic technique of augmented transition networks (ATNs).

    Basically, you feed the program a set of pieces in the same style (say, Beethoven sonatas or Bach cantatas or Chopin Nocturnes), it processes them, abstracts from them the defining characteristics of this style and then proceeds to recombine them to create a new piece which, while noticeably different from all the the originals, can often easily pass for one of them.

  • Someone already does this (Score:3)

    by paunchy ( 28471 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @06:53AM (#880245)
    Mongomusic [mongomusic.com] already categorizes music. They have a fairly large database (100K+ songs) which was created in part using DSP technology. You can search by genre, listen to a personalized music stream or find similar sounding songs, albums and artists.

    I was skeptical but it actually works quite well. Even better, they're an open source shop through and through: Apache, mod_perl, mysql, etc.

  • Advertisers, psychologists, neurologists, and pharmacists have all learned ways to manipulate the brain in very mechanical ways, getting very machine-line responses.

    It's romantic to think we each have a "soul" and I wish I could believe it. But as science progresses, the concept of the soul starts to look more an more like just another archaic model for explaining processes that we used to not understand.

    Music is going to be demystified some day, and the torch will be passed from the artists who do it intuitively, to engineers who do it very consciously. Then they will write computer programs to generate it and machines that are made out of meat will listen to it and smile predictably.

    Sometimes I hope that by the time it happens, I will be dust. It seems as if understanding humans will dehumanize them. In a few hundred years, whenever someone mentions the old terms "dignity" or "free will", people will chuckle and say "those are relics of an outmoded belief system."


    ---
  • it definately won't be able to recognize good music over bad. But a (broad) categorization should be possible:
    - rock: includes punk, hardrock, speedmetal
    - techno: includes trance, gabber
    etc.

    Obviously a lot of people are going to be unhappy, getting 'their' music lumped up in 1 category. But it could still be a useful tool.

    //rdj
  • Wait, let me guess
    Your favorite type of music is the only real music around, and everything else is just noise.


    luckman

  • Sure you can. You can define something as intensely personal as feelings through somethign as crude and impersonal as words. They'll be able to write an algorithm that will contain what's different about X piece of music from Y piece of music. Do that for a while, and do it well, and you'll have a lot of useful and interesting data to correlate.

    You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard. I doubt that an algorithm would always categorize things the same way as you would, but I bet it could still do a good job, or come up with some insights.

    For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.

    Jeez. If you're not going to contribute, but just want to sit on the sidelines and talk about how people shouldn't be able to do WHAT THEY ARE DOING, shut the hell up and go somewhere else.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • You are incorrect in saying that music is NOT math. In fact, music is VERY mathematical, especially more complex kinds of music such as that of Mozart or Bach.

    Nearly all music is based around a time signature--the number of beats per measure and the type of note that is given one beat. The time signature determines the feel of the music's "beat" or "rhythm". Most popular music is simple 4/4 time (also called "common time"). Listen to ANY song on a popular radio station and count "one, two, three, four". More advanced kinds of music, such as classical, jazz, or progressive rock/metal, however, use more complex time signatures like 7/8 or 19/16. The most familiar example would be Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", which is in 5/4 time.

    Some very skilled drummers, such as Terry Bozzio [terrybozzio.com], take the mathematical aspect of music even further by combining time signatures and playing them simultaneously ("polyrhythms").

    Simple math may not be all there is to music, but it plays a significant role.
  • i suppose that rhythm would carry more weight than harmony in that kind of analysis... like straight ahead jazz can be recognized by swing eith notes, whereas fusion wouldn't swing but would still be modal. or, what is the difference between a three chord ac/dc and alot of the punk stuff... probably tempo and tightness. interesting to ponder....
  • If you're correct and music really does involve more than "rather robotic computational ability", then don't worry. This attempt, and all attempts to find the mathematical basis of beauty will fail. However it's clear from your defensive (almost paranoid) tone that you don't really believe that's the case. You can see that the universe is a huge mathematical puzzle, a puzzle so complex that it includes beings who are trying to solve it. But because of your blinkered distinction between "science" and "art", you don't want to admit that anything mathematical can be beautiful.

    I think you're afraid that this might work, that science might invade the realm of art. What you don't realise is that science and art are two ways of expressing the same truth.

    If a mathematical mechanism can produce art, it doesn't mean that art is fundamentally ugly. It means that mathematics is fundamentally beautiful.

  • that there was something like the Internet Movie Database [imdb.com] but for music. I know that there's a lot of relationships between artists and their music, style, and relationships. It'd be nice to have a RDBMS to publicly help us drill down on the location of that beauty in music.

    ----

  • Proof (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:25AM (#880268)
    Using fractals to find simalarities in music should allow us to prove that there is only one rap song and that it is just being re-recorded by everyone with a microphone. Same for most classical, country and pop.

  • Visualizing Music (with old Tube tuners) (Score:4)

    by scotpurl ( 28825 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:52AM (#880275)
    I recall there being a high-end, all-analog radio tuner that used a special wide-screen, green phospor, cathode-ray tube to display the entire FM radio spectrum at once. The nice part is, it allowed you to tune to the center of what was being broadcast. (Those big transmitters did drift.) And it totally fit with the analog-only mindset of being forced to listen to a digitally/decimally perfect frequency.

    The long-time users of those systems said they could tell what type of music the station was playing by the frequency distribution, and frequency energies being used. Some said, for their favorite station, they could even tell what period of music was being played, or if it was one of their favorite composers.
  • I suppose someone is going try to make a arbitrary music writing program based on this info , no?

    It may have already happened. It would explain the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, N'Sync, and the Backstreet Boys better than any other scenario I can think of.

    -

  • www.allmusic.com

    It's not complete by any means, the info on rarer stuff is pretty lacking, but it's the best database I've found.
  • id be great to discover that the record industry has been using a version of this program to shoot out the music of boy bands (and their contemporaries). I can see the headlines: Backstreet Boys constructed from more algorithms than Al Gore.

    there are places where tb is more common than tv.

  • Interviews (Score:5)

    by Ketzer ( 207882 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @04:16AM (#880283)
    If you've seen interviews with many artists, you've probably noticed how most of them hate to be classified. If this really works, it would kill a lot of pretension. I can see it now:

    Reporter: Despite the fact that you're considered a rock artist, you seem to be having a great deal of success amongst the country and even R+B fans. Why do you think that is?

    Artist: Well I don't really think of myself as a rcok musician. People are always trying to classify my music as pop, or hard rock, or soft rock, or whatever. But I don't restrict myself to those terms, I just think of myself as an artist, and I think my work really defies being simply classified as rock.

    [Reporter looks down at a laptop, hits a few keys]

    Reporter: No, the computer says it's clearly rock music. Not country, not big-band, not funk, not innovative-genre-transcending-art, just rock music.

    Artist: Well, yes, but it's really-
    Reporter: That's all the time we have for now. Tune in tomorrow as I interview another popular rock band.
  • Would be using this software to analyse what I currently listen to when i'm doing certain tasks on my PC. Then it could download/compose/stream/remix music on the fly to suit my tastes all day long.

    No longer would I sit at napster wondering which (unsigned) artist I should download today :)

  • How reliable is it? (Score:3)

    by Mike Connell ( 81274 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:27AM (#880289) Homepage
    <skeptical>

    I hope it's better than the BAIR system for recognising naughty pictures (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/21/15162 15)

    </skeptical>

    Mike.

  • Where's the beef? (Score:4)

    by bfree ( 113420 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:27AM (#880290)
    That is the shortest story I think I have ever seen on slashdot!
    I can't myself see how much detail can be garnered from the amplitude alone of the notes in a musical piece. I can see how heavy metal and jazz would be quite different, but how about jazz and drum'n'bass, they are incredibly similar forms that would be distiguishable by the underlying beat rythms (or perhaps more likely through the persistance of instruments). Would a fractal based on note amplitude grab this? I can imagine it might, but if you threw it the whole gamut of dance music (acid, trance, acid-trance, garage, girly garage, ambient, techno.....need I continue) I am sure it would fall apart as the large scale use of compression alone would bring these musical forms incredibly close together in terms of amplitude (if everything is at 100db post-compression as often happens with dance music).
    Another useful bow in the arrow of anyone interested in categorising music, but I feel that a full quiver of tools is always going to be needed to even come close to trying to do this job.

  • Visualization (Score:5)

    by Tomcow2000 ( 189275 ) on Friday August 04, 2000 @03:28AM (#880291) Homepage
    This could create one hell of a visualization plugin for Winamp...
  • Actually, having recently written an audio signaturing/recognition system, generic genre type classification is very easy.

    There is a strong correlation between average spectral usage and genre, particularly between genres such as classical (which looks fairly symmetric, as a good symphony uses the whole spectral range) and more beat/vocal heavy types such as electronic, which are dominated by low frequencies. For song level identification, however, you need to include additonal features, such as sonic energy, which gives a unique (across my test sets at least) fingerprint of music. But, based on those sonic signatures you can realise that track1.mp3 is really Metallica's Unforgiven (which is useful if you didn't know that it was ;).

  • This reminds me of a post I saw on Perl Monks [perlmonks.org]. The author described how, in one of his English/Literature classes, his teacher defined poetry as being a succint and condensed use of language. Later, while writing perl, he was commenting everything and trying to describe the script completely. When he finished, he realized that the comments were much, much longer than the code they attempted to describe. Therefore, he said, perl (arguably this could be extrapolated to programming in general) is poetry.
  • I'm looking for the reference right now, so folks, give me a few hours to a day or two to find the right reference. I even remember the first review I read had the reviewer in New York, and the copious complaints about multipathing, etc. etc. I just can't remember what audio magazine I read that review in (and my hi-fi pals are drawing blanks). Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. :-)

    Something like the Marantz 10b sounds similar, but this was a really high-end device (meaning beaucoup bucks).
  • Have you looked at http://www.allmusic.com/? It gives a biography and discography of the artist and lists influences as well as similar bands.
  • heck I wanna know when the Beastie Boys sample The Beatles and be notified and give the option to follow up on the samples within the songs.
    As someone who routinely beats samples into a whir of unrecognizable sound, and would prefer not to pay any "sample clearance fees" whenver I sample anything. You want a rights issue, TacoBoy? You are NOT free to sample anything you want to. Maybe you might want to read what negativland [negativland.com] has to say about Intellectual Property.
  • I'm currently listening to "Pulse Piece", by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. Layers of distorted piano, organ, and percussion, with a pulse-like beat. I wonder what this clever technology would make of that? Rock? Jazz? Techno? (It predates techno by a good ten years)

    Hell, i wonder what it would make of half the stuff i have ripped to mp3 here at work... Steve Tibbetts, David Torn, Erik Satie, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Klezmatics, Last Exit, Nordic stuff, Sonic Youth, etc...

    --
  • Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot could use this technology to eliminate the overload of spam and trolls? If it can work for music, it can work for spam. Just my 2 cents as an honest AC. [Don't blame ACs for spam, now the fashion is for spammers to take a nom-de-fume -- I won't dignify them by mentioning their names.]

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