Hi all,

I'm pasting in the entire article because it won't stay on the website for long and I think this is a long term discussion topic. For me, it is about record companies trying to turn a quick buck, and potentially - or already - throttling the life out of real musical creativity by forcing all commercial music into a narrowly defined hole. This article is about the development of technology which could be used to make the problem even bigger, depending on whether and/or how it is used.

There are a lot of issues involved in this, and some are touched on in the article. On the other hand, the concept of the technology is pretty clever.

Helen


Pop perfection or manufactured conformity? http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/articulate/

Posted by Adele O'Hare: Norah Jones: A lot like Van Halen?

Is musical taste a uniquely human, personal thing, or can a computer program mimic it well enough to pick hits and even create them? The Guardian reports that a handful of companies are "using psychological research and mathematics to try to create the perfect pop song".

Earlier this year, Articulate looked at a program called Echo Nest that analyses the pitch, key, rhythm and structure of songs, and surveys people's opinions of them to predict what will be a hit.

The new technology goes even further. A company called Platinum Blue Music Intelligence stores data on every song that has ever made it into the UK Top 40 or the US Billboard Hot 100 since the 1960s – plus plenty of songs that flopped.

Using "spectral deconvolution", the company's software can pick out 40 pieces of data about the deep structure of each song – including its melody, chord progressions, instruments and "fullness of sound" - and plot the data visually, in a three-dimensional "music universe" with each hit represented by a point of light.

When plotted like this, about 80 per cent of the songs that have ever been hits are positioned together in 50 clusters of stars, with black space in between – meaning any popular song is likely to be based on one of a relatively small number of basic structures. And Norah Jones's jazz belongs to the same cluster as the pop of Vanessa Carlton and the metal of Van Halen.

Could the secret of a hit song be this obscure and mathematical? There's huge potential for record companies to use this kind of technology to predict hits and alter songs to improve their chances of chart success – but The Guardian reports that they rarely own up to it.

"It's evil," is the verdict of British pop songwriter Guy Chambers, who's written hits for Robbie Williams.

    "It reminds me of Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Hal's not a friendly computer… It's a really desperate situation. It's one of the reasons the music industry is on its arse. There are lots of reasons it's on its arse, but one is that there aren't a lot of people willing to put gut instinct first."


And what about the moral question of whether reliance on the technology will enforce conformity and crush musical innovation? Philosopher, computer programmer and musician Jaron Lanier argues that the software would fail to recognise the value of a truly original work of musical genius:

    "The problem with replacing creativity with analysis is that while, almost by definition, it will work some of the time, it creates a meaningless sensibility. This isn't just a moral point, it's the moral point. If our purpose is to please ourselves in the most average way possible, without caring what anything means, we might as well just kill ourselves. We've lost the moral authority to want anything."


Then again, there's a long tradition of artists shunning the corporate record labels and mainstream sound. If the use of hit prediction software becomes widespread among record labels and radio stations, perhaps we can expect a resurgence of music that's truly indie in response.