Martin and Ruth, aka Spike, the next big girl/boy duo (so they hope) add some synth and a new background vocal to the mix. He saves the song and she emails it to Polyphonic Human Media Interface who, within 24 hours, will tell them whether their song will be a hit. When the results arrive they hover over the 20in screen and click on the returned mail. There is a graph, showing a cluster of many dots, like a constellation, and somewhere in the cluster a red spot. The spot marks their song, not quite a bullseye, but still in the throng. "It's scored a seven," Ruth says, scanning down. "We're in. The record company will definitely meet us now." Their future suddenly looks a lot rosier.
Sounds unlikely? It shouldn't. Because, while no one's talking about it, it seems that the whole record industry is already using just this process. From unsigned acts dreaming in their garage, to multinationals such as Sony and Universal, everyone is clandestinely using a new and controversial technology to gain an edge on their competitors. And just as with athletes and performance-enhancing drugs, there is a remarkable reluctance to talk about it. But the secret is out: the record biz, once that bastion of wayward creative flair, is succumbing to the plain old-fashioned science of statistical analysis.
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.
It's all in the clusters, you see. Hit songs, typically, fall into one of a number of groupings - there are around 50 in the US and 60 in the UK where, traditionally, tastes have been more diverse. Belonging to the same cluster does not mean songs sound the same, though, more that they are mathematically similar. And the analysis has thrown up some very unlikely musical bedfellows: Some U2 songs are in the same cluster as Beethoven, while spandex ultra rocker Van Halen sits right alongside MOR piano babe Vanessa Carlton. It is for this reason that Polyphonic are confident their software won't homogenise our already stratified and similar sounding charts. They are already working with one radio station to expand their playlist without losing audience share by selecting songs with the correct mathematical rhythms. In a world where drearily repetitive playlists have become the norm this could be the answer to an oft-uttered prayer.
Ever since its initial trials, HSS has proven a hit with record labels who sent material to Polyphonic in hope of a second opinion. 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. Other artists, including Anastacia, J-Lo and Robbie Williams are also rumoured to have asked for the hitmaker's analysis.
HSS's crucial design flaw is that it can only look at the past. Those "leftfield", illogical and grassroots-inspired departures from the norm, such as disco or drum and bass, could not have been predicted - but they shift the mainstream and provide the momentum any culture needs to remain fresh. As Smith says, "Art is the one area where people can, and should be able to, make radical statements. Anything that encourages safe, consensus-driven music should be used with caution."
Though it might make the accountants happy and ultimately, even the artists and audiences too, isn't HSS just still a little, well, boring? Isn't half the fun of the pop industry the mistakes, legendary, apocryphal episodes that go into making the best - and worst - of the records we listen to? With HSS would we have had Led Zeppelin's Red Snapper escapades (no singles here), Brian Wilson's lost Smile album, Jeff Buckley et al?I doubt it. But while there's no doubt the romance has gone and while it might feel like a sad mathematical indictment on these most indecisive and creatively fearful of times, you had better get used to HSS. Your listening DNA is about to be mapped.
To read the full article, visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1391951,00.html?gusrc=rss
