

New Music Software Predicts The Hits - firefoxman1
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113673324

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Perceval
While I'm certain that the software works, it's obvious that it can only work
to a limited extent. It has probably been fed a seed sample of past hits from
which a set of general inferences have been inductively extrapolated. It then
applies those inferred rules to score new songs fed into the algorithm.
Nothing especially exciting about that.

Where it will always fail is in assessing 'novelty.' By definition, something
that is novel is unexpected, new, innovated, or otherwise disruptive to our
established norms. An algorithm based on norming songs to a generalized set of
standards will, by definition, never understand the appeal of something novel.

Now, 99% of novel things are probably going to be bad. This doesn't set them
apart from the 99% of derivative things that are also bad. But the 1% novel
hits will be overlooked, missed, denied, or remixed if this algorithm is given
actual decision-making weight. Just like teaching-to-the-test is frowned upon,
production-for-the-algorithm will become the new conformity-inducing
straightjacket for human creativity.

Finally, it's unclear what assumptions the algorithm creators are operating
on, given that public tastes change over time. Are they operating solely in
the pop music era created during the 1960s through to the present? Are they
taking an even more restricted data set of pop music since the advent of the
synth? How many genres of music do they include in their seed, and are the
inferences drawn from them generalizable across genres? Across cultures to the
pop charts of other countries?

Hopefully this type of algorithmic norming is less disastrous to the
recording-promotion-distribution industry than it was to finance industry...

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gdp
An internet community of musicians that I frequent collectively played with
Hit Song Science during their "free trial" period.

Basically, we discovered that it doesn't do a very good job.

For example, I had a track that was 1:57 long with a very slow tempo and a
minimal arrangement, however there was a slide guitar towards the end. This
gave it a really high affinity with a bunch of US chart-topping country &
western hits, and so it had a score of something like 8, which is just absurd.

So while I like the general principle, we discovered very quickly that its
"similarity" metric is probably just too simple. There seemed to be a very
weak correlation between songs that we thought sounded like hits, and the
score they got on HSS.

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zandorg
My track Paris Thru the Tears scores a whopping 7.9! :-D

It was recorded on analogue synths (£1500 + £200), a HardSID slaved to an old
P300 running Windows 98, an old Akai sampler (which cost £100), and 2 crappy
mixing desks (£75 and £100) over the past month...

The only digital hardware was my Toshiba laptop running the Cubase sequencer.

But I have been making music since 1998.

[My point here is that getting a 7.9 doesn't mean huge studio expenses and
watered-down content]

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scotth
Would you mind linking the song?

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zandorg
Hi! Sorry, it's not ready for release in that way. I don't want criticism of
it to affect the other songs/tracks I'm working on.

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prat
Here is an artical my Malcolm Gladwell that talks about predicting movie/music
hits <http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html>

