Robben Ford Discussion

[iamthewalrus]

Maybe I'm the last to know about this but there was an article in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine section (12/14, their 3rd annual "Year In Ideas" issue) and one of the year's 'bright ideas' is software called "Hit Song Science." The creators are convinced it has tremendous power to predict whether a song will be a top 40 hit or not. There is a fair amount of evidence to support their claim. Here's the first few sentences of the NYTimes article:

"Hit Song Science

When Norah Jones released her first album, she was a long shot at best. "Come Away With Me" was filled with mellow, sultry tunes - precisely the opposite of the histrionic diva pop crowding the charts. Virtually no one expected Jones to score a major hit.

No one, that is, except for a piece of artificial intelligence called Hit Song Science, a program that tries to determine, with mathematical precision, whether a song is going to be a Top 40 hit. When scientists fed Jones's album into that computer, alarm bells went off: the program predicted that eight tracks would hit the charts. "We were like, whoa, that's funky," says Mike McCready, the C.E.O. of Polyphonic HMI, the Barcelona-based company the developed the software application. A few months later, Jones's album went multiplatinum - and Hit Song Science had proved it could pick a hit as well as Clive Davis.

But how? At the heart of the program is a "clustering" algorithm that locates acoustic similarities between songs, like common bits of rhythm, harmonies or keys. The software takes a new tune and compares it with the mathematical signatures of the last 30 years of Top 40 hits. The closer the song is to "a hit cluster," the more likely - in theory - that the kids won't be able to resist it. Yet the weird thing is, songs that are mathematically similar don't necessarily sound the same. The scientists found that U2 is similar to Beethoven, and that Van Halen shares qualities with the piano rock of Vanessa Carlton. Even more bizarrely, 50 Cent's throbbing rap tune "If I Can't" correlates with "(There's) No Gettin' Over Me," a twangy country ditty by Ronnie Milsap."

The article, by Clive Thompson, goes on. But to get ther real low down you should go to Polyphonic HMI's web site and check it out. Here's the link:

http://www.polyphonichmi.com/index.html

Cheers!
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