What are these?
The same song, right? So what's going on?
Humans like categorizing things, and that extends to music as well. Some categories are easy. You can likely tell the difference between something like this and this (even though they ARE connected in a round about way, actually!)
Sometimes pop artists will release two versions of songs, like Ms. Swift did, to appeal to both markets, in this case the pop market and the country market. It increases album sales. Shania Twain did the same thing with her album Up!.
(In relation to the last post, you can still tell that both songs are Love Story, of course, because they share the same melody with the same intervals and have the same harmonic structure, even if they're presented differently.)
The Music Genome Project is the most expansive project to classify music to date. The idea is to classify music using a list of attributes, create a list of those attributes for every song, and then determine how similar songs are to each other.
This technology allows us to have Pandora, a music streaming service that guesses what music you might like when you tell it either a specific song or a category of songs. Pandora's success as a service shows how well The Music Genome Project works.
You can see a list of attributes The Music Genome Project uses here.
I do wonder if Pandora became really popular and had a sort of open-source contribution aspect to it, how much that could affect the music industry.
ReplyDeleteThat is really interesting. I've heard both version, but never realized they were different. I've always wanted to be able to play music in different "styles", but couldn't figure out how to make a single melody sound like it was country or bluesy or pop or like Christmas or patriotic or whatever. Fascinating.
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