A Computer Program That Predicts Song Hits?

[DudeAsInCool]

A computer program is changing the face of the music business by allowing record labels to predict a hit at the click of a mouse. Is this the death of pop as we know it, asks Jo Tatchell, or a new hope for unsigned bands everywhere?

Monday January 17, 2005

The Guardian

 

The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can "predict" the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years' worth of Billboard hit singles - 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

Read more here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/st...1391951,00.html

[rainbowdemon]

There was a rumor in the late 70's that Boston did something like that.

[Shawn]

Awesome.

With made-up artists performing for computers, soon there won't be a music industry even trying to satisfy us.

[DudeAsInCool]

There is a mathematical connection to music. How it configures to what we like is another question. But I'd love to look at their analysis...

[Ken]

It won't work for me.

Maybe it'll work for that manufactured top 40 crap.

[method77]

Awesome.

With made-up artists performing for computers, soon there won't be a music industry even trying to satisfy us.

Music industry as we know it today will die anyway