Music and Algorithms, two favorite subjects
It's All About the Algorithm, Baby!One Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI (www.polyphonichmi.com), has created Hit Song Science, an application that can take any song and break it down to its mathematical core. If you're like me, you probably didn't even know that pop music has a mathematical core, but it does, and apparently this can be used to determine a song's "hitability."
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The technology was first developed when researchers at Group AIA, the parent company of Polyphonic HMI, decided to analyze the entire music universe. The company took the approximately 3.5 million songs that have been released commercially since the late 1950s and ran them through a computer.
"When we plotted all the songs on a map, it looked like the Milky Way system," said Tracie Reed, vice president of North American operations for Polyphonic HMI. Later, the company stripped out just the songs that had been top-30 hits in the past five years. "We realized that our beautiful Milky Way no longer looked like the Milky Way, but like a series of constellations," she said.
Within those constellations, the researchers noticed distinct patterns for hit music and found that a popular song could be grouped within one of 18 clusters. Songs within a cluster are similar mathematically, though they won't necessarily sound similar. In fact, it could theoretically be possible for Enya and Metallica to be in the same cluster, though they obviously sound nothing alike. However, even if you do like wildly divergent sounds, there's a good chance that your favorite songs will belong to the same cluster.
I guess we're stuck with I-IV-V forever now. Eh, works for me.
* Ray, 11/23/2003 11:55:18 AM
