Gingerbread Man on 27/7/2007 at 21:57

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I was just thinking to myself as I watched bicyclists careen wildy into traffic and tried not to char my feet in the afternoon sun. That's a dangerous way to be thinking, let me assure you.

Anyway, I can hear my neighbour's radio and it's one of those new r&b / pop songs or something -- heavily vocoder (oh god how ancient I am... I actually suppose they have digital versions these days) -- and it sounds like a bunch of other popular songs I've heard in malls or on radios around. And I got to thinking about one day what if we had computers churning out the popular music... it shouldn't be THAT hard to get a text-to-speech program that a) sounded good and b) could be tuned on a per-syllable basis... effectively allowing it to sing.

But that's nothing special.

What is special would be an obvious extension of the Amazon / Google searching paradigm (only way more sophisticated) that was able to analyse popular music from all kinds of angles -- what tempos went with what, which phrasing was appropriate (or at least, most often displayed) in a power ballad, instrumentation and theory and all that learned through inference.

Bear in mind that I'm talking about a theoretical, here. I know it would take the computers a really long time to basically "learn" music from scratch. And I know it's a bit of an infinite monkeys thing -- nearly all of the produced music would be John Cage's wet dreams.

That's when the bicyclist came rocketing across the road, if anyone's interested.

My train of thought dead-ended, I backed up quickly and roared off down an adjacent siding. What about just using data analysis to write the Ultimate Rock Song? Just send something out to crawl all the lyric sites on the web -- sure, lots of them are incorrect or incomplete, but that's the genius of SCIENCE and Large Sample Sizes. Give the bot a list of every rock band you can think of and send it out there to look for any lyrics from those artists.

Analyse frequency of content from individual word appearance to often-used-phrases. Look at average song structures, tempos, durations, instrumentation. Peel it all apart, choose the most representative things about the Rock Genre as an entity, and then stitch it all back up.

I wonder what would come back once the computers had finished with it?

I think the Ultimate Rock Song would go like this:

Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no
Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no

Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no
Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no

Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Satan's coming for you

Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no
Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no

Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Let's rock

(guitar solo)

Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no
Baby, baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, baby, no

Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Ooooo, come on

Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no

Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
Baby, baby, yeah
And she's buying a stairway to heaven



Um.

So yeah. How you guys doing?
:D

Rug Burn Junky on 27/7/2007 at 22:23

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I don't trust any computer that doesn't get halfway through analyzing the task, spits out "Rocks Off" by the Rolling Stones, lights up a joint and calls it a day.

Schattentänzer on 27/7/2007 at 23:19

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This reminds me a bit of the studies with (http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/morphing/morphing.htm) composite faces. I guess if you would break down songs into key, progression, intervalls, measure and the whole schtick, you could do something similar, but I somehow doubt the result would be especially pleasing. Music (especially pop stuff) is so structured, the brain probably would not like the fuzzy result.

Tocky on 28/7/2007 at 03:44

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Fuzzy might be a welcome change from pop of late. So much of it reminds me of driving into a subdivision you can't find your way out of because all the houses are the same. There is too much formulaic structure, too little that stands out.

What happened to the days of experimentation? Maybe it is time to hand it over to the robots. Operatic backgound vocals and crescendos of futuristic computer generated unnatural sound might be the ticket. Ressurect Alan Parsons Project. The future sounded so much better in the past.

Well maybe it's not that bad, just a lull in the current. The best is certainly around the corner. I just don't want to hear another once promising band phone it in while they party in Hollywood. Rob Zombie ass.

Tocky on 28/7/2007 at 04:11

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The future is still bypassing backwoods dailup. I will check it out when I visit townie friends though. Thanks. It doesn't have to be rock just the two guitar solos and the wails of the damned. So long as there is no piano noodling and penguins in pergatory.