sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Radio 4’s In Business program ran this story about software that is being used to analyse music and movies to determine whether they will be successful or not. For music there were a couple of applications, one being Platinum Blue, that analyse various characteristics (beat, pitch, length, structure and so on) of a sound file and compare it with other sound files, to see how similar they are to other hits.

For movies, there are people coding each section of a script, each interaction, and each second of plot on a database, and then using neural networking software to score the hit quotient of scripts before shooting even starts. The software can even recommend ways to make movies more likely to be hits, perhaps by tweaking the plot, locations, or order in which the story is told. Robot screenwriters can only be months away given this capability.

The program interviewed a couple of record company A&R people, who said that it was helping them, because they were running it to confirm that they’d made the right choices using their own ears. This seemed rather unambitious: perhaps the contributors were finding a way to justify their roles, when the software seemed

to have made the task of spotting pop hits into an algorithm. Besides, it ignored three really interesting potential applications for the software:

• A music search and recommendation tool: teach the software about the music you like, then send it out onto the Internet to find some surprises for you
• A human-free record label: get people to upload their music to you, and promote the content that is most likely to be a hit, without employing any A&R
• The musical equivalent of a spell-check: build it into software like Garageband, so people can be sure they’re producing hits before they send them to anyone

This software-driven approach is an alternative to the collaborative filtering of people like Criteo, and it has the advantage that the computer gets to listen to all the music, which probably saves someone a lot of suffering!

Technorati Tags: Radio 4, In Business, Platinum Blue, Garageband, Criteo, Online Music, Innovation