Someone Call the Wambulance

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Glenn Branca, in his New York Times blog, writes that apparently all music has not improved hand-in-hand with technology over the past 50 years. The irony that his own music has all been written in the past 50 years seems lost on him. (Although maybe he’s self-hating as well?)

I don’t know whether I have more of a problem with the idea that music is supposed to “improve” alongside technology or with the idea that there have been no worthwhile developments in music for over 50 years.

Or maybe he’s embracing the technological strategy of linkbaiting by being a curmudgeon.

(via NYTimes)

Machines to Listen for You

A recent story on NPR’s Morning Edition describes a new software system to analyze songs for hit potential. Quoth Music Intelligence Solutions CEO David Meredith:

“[It’s] a series of algorithms that we use to look at what’s the potential of a song to be sticky with a listener,” Meredith says. “To have those patterns in the music that would correspond with what human brain waves would find pleasing.”

Meredith’s software uses algorithms to model how a brain finds “pleasure.” Even putting aside the strange attribution of taste to brain waves (as opposed to just the brain, or—I don’t know—the person?), this model has a lot in it to talk about. First off, the idea that pleasure is caused by “patterns in the music.”

What kind of patterns is he talking about?

Meredith says his software found that hits have certain common patterns of rhythm, harmony, chord progression, length and lyrics.

The choosing of parameters, even seemingly innocuous ones like “rhythm” and “harmony,” is an interpretive move. These parameters define the way the software can “hear,” grouping or separating various songs in contingent ways. Of course the story is vague about how exactly the software parses patterns in “lyrics” or “length”—you wouldn’t want to give up any trade secrets. But let’s take length as an easy one.

How would you incorporate length into an evaluation of a song’s “hit score?” It’s presumably a single number. Is shorter better? Maybe the ideal length is determined by a relationship to the various other scores? How do you extract a hit rating from it? By embedding these questions in software, Music Intelligence Solutions obscures them. The software must have a methodology, just as the music critic would, but since it outputs a score—7.6 out of ten is apparently “good for a platinum rating”—this methodology goes unexamined.

David Bell, of the hip-hop duo the Block Scholars, paid $90 to use it.
“To me, it’s an unbiased validation of your music,” Bell says. “It’s not your family turning around and saying, ‘Oh, you got a great song.’”

The computer told Bell he had a 7.1 — good, but not great. So he went back to the studio and remixed. He got his score up to 7.6 — good for a platinum rating. He could hold his head up.

The software configures musical production in a particular and contingent way. Bell produces a song, the machine evaluates it, he remixes, and the machine reevaluates. In the context of evaluative software, the labor of remixing is a negotiation with the machine.

The assumption is that the machine that turns music into numbers, processes them, and gives back a number, must be “unbiased.” By displacing evaluation from people to “a series of algorithms,” Music Intelligence Solutions banks on the obscuring power of technology: “your family” has bias, but a machine does not. Of course, the workings of the machine are entirely sculpted by bias. Each decision about what matters in a song is tweaked and informed by the programmers. The algorithms do not make themselves, nor do they decide which musical traits are significant.

Objectivity is produced through the use of numbers and software interfaces. Technologically mediated bias becomes objective evaluation. Software like Music Intelligence’s UPlaya propagates a certain view of what “hits” are, and even exceptions to the rule are integrated into a particular musical viewpoint:

It doesn’t surprise New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones that a computer can predict hits, but he says it can’t predict all the hits. Sometimes, songs come along that don’t fit the mold.

Songs that are popular in spite of their evaluation results (Frere-Jones uses the example of “Da Da Da” by Trio) become songs “that don’t fit the mold.” Now, not fitting the mold is another story about how songs become popular. On one side, we have software to account for certain kinds of success (like “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas—8.9 out of 10), and on the other, a popular cultural myth about the appeal of mold-breaking. Evaluative software recasts songs that don’t meet its model as part of another cultural narrative.

Is this something to worry about? Probably not. For the integration of taste into business decisions, numbers can be very useful—they turn the the qualitative into the quantitative, with its sheen of objectivity. For listeners, though, I find it hard to imagine that you’ll be seeing ads for “The new Britney Spears: 9.1 out of 10 on the hit scale! You’ll Love It!” Actually, I take that back. You might really see these things, like impact factors on science journals, or prominent magazine reviews on CDs. If they actually use these in promotion, and not just in house, that would be both totally wild and fodder for like a million more blog posts.

Even though (or perhaps because) they’re making fun of my man John Cage, this movie looks like it could be pretty enjoyable. Laughing at experimental music is half of the fun!

(via better taste than sorry)

Hey look! There is more than one way to combine often-maligned genres, I guess.

The Psychologically Ideal Bowie

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)

Pearls Before Breakfast

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

The Washington Post had Joshua Bell play a Stradivarius in the DC Metro to see if people would stop and notice. They didn’t (except for one person who had seen him recently in concert). So it seems that part of “the finest classical music in the world” relies on people having certain expectations or being in a certain place. Joshua Bell is obviously a talented classical violinist, but the kinds of “best” and “most” in this story are contingent on a number of supposedly “extramusical” concerns. (Also, I don’t think I like what the Post is implying with their “Pearls Before Breakfast” headline.)

(via washington post)

An interesting post on a New York Times blog about John Roberts’ opinion of Michael Jackson when he worked in the Reagan White House:

I hate to sound like one of Mr. Jackson’s records, constantly repeating the same refrain, but I recommend that we not approve this letter [inviting MJ to the White House]. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the obvious: whatever its status as a cultural phenomenon, the Jackson concert tour is a massive commercial undertaking. The tour will do quite well financially by coming to Washington, and there is no need for the President to applaud such enlightened self-interest. Frankly, I find the obsequious attitude of some members of the White House staff toward Mr. Jackson’s attendants, and the fawning posture they would have the President of the United States adopt, more than a little embarrassing.

Roberts’ position on the repetition of pop music seems to inadvertently channel the European serialist avant-garde’s obsession with non-repetition, summed up by Stockhausen here:

I think that one should try to make music which is a bit more… flexible, so to speak, a bit more irregular. Irregularity is a challenge, you see. How far can we go in making music irregular?

(via NYT)

Survey-Produced ‘Most Wanted Song’ Sounds Horrible