Together in electric dreams

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

Together in electric dreams describes a piece of software that can predict whether a song will become a hit:

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.

HSS has a track record:

HSS confidently predicted Norah Jones’s meteoric success (tipping no less than 10 songs on her debut album Come Away with Me) well in advance of her chart-topping appearances and in the face of an industry unconvinced she would have any commercial impact. HSS also picked out all the Maroon 5 hits, including both This Love and She Will be Loved.

Of course, my first questions was, What does it take to go from recognizing hits via software to generating them?

Comments

  1. Grasspunk says:

    Software like this is backwards-looking. New hits often contain elements that are fresh and part of the current music conversation or take it further, e.g. the Billie Eilish weak voice thing has been around since Melanie Martinez but only gained wider uptake with Billie.

    Getting more specific, the question for me is could some ML software with a corpus of 80s music have come up with Blinding Lights? Analog synths, Take On Me drumline, Maniac drum fills? Or would it be a boring blend of things? Or does its value depend on modern techniques that are not obvious, like sidechain and other digital processing or Max Martin song structure?

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