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| From | synchro1 <synchro1@ix.netcom.com> |
| Subject | I want a hit record, yea |
| Date | Wed, 17 Dec 2003 21:08:16 -0800 |
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Hit Song Science
By CLIVE THOMPSON
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 the 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 that 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.
This year, several record companies began using Hit Song Science to help
pick which songs on an album to promote. Others are now using it in the
studio, taking a rough mix of a new song, checking to see how hit-worthy it
is, then tweaking it until it has ''good mathematics,'' as McCready puts
it. He can foresee a day when most major hits will have been vetted by
algorithms.
Which is, depending on how you look at it, either a wonderful breakthrough
for science or an incredibly bleak statement about the music industry.
Critics for years have complained that record labels produce only bland
albums that mimic what's already popular. But Hit Song Science takes that
trend to its logical absurdity: it does not merely aim at the middle of the
road -- it calculates it, with scientific precision.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14HIT.html?ex=1072716407&ei=1&en=dceaa6001772f8c5
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