Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
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Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Another study to file under “ROFLscience”: The “ideal” Bowie song, based on a statisical feelings analysis of lyrics in Bowie’s oeuvre, correlated to success on the charts. Here is psychologist Nick Troop, discussing and then performing the ideal song.
So, in a little proto-analysis of what’s going on here. We have a rather complicated system behind a value claim. The “ideal” song in this instance is one with chart success, and chart success is going to be linked specifically to the lyrics. Even more specifically, the lyrics are not going to be parsed as they would by a human listener, but through a computational analysis that groups words into certain categories related to feelings and sociability.
Once we’ve gotten to this point, there are only really two options in two categories: chart success or not, and positive or negative lyrics. Find a “correlation,” write up your own Bowie lyrics, riff on the guitar part to “Quicksand,” and you’ve got a video for the “oddly enough” section on the news!
(You might also want to check out some of Troop’s other Bowie analyses at his site: The Gospel According to David Bowie)
