Members Gribs Posted July 27, 2012 Members Share Posted July 27, 2012 Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music This is a very interesting research paper and is being discussed in other forums. If you haven't seen it yet then I would suggest taking a look. The body has lots of math and data analysis and is extremely interesting to just about nobody but a math/computational science geek like me, but the introduction and discussion (at end) should be penetrable to the non-mathematically inclined. The discussion is particularly telling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members pogo97 Posted July 27, 2012 Members Share Posted July 27, 2012 This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness. A quick check shows that this is an online journal [...With the support of an external Editorial Board and a streamlined peer-review system...] and the references are mostly of books rather than original papers from journals, so I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Mathematicians love to mess with great lumps of quantized music in this way. (these guys used "The million song dataset... a publicly available collection of audio descriptions and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks." but their data set only starts in 1955. I'm not clear on what the "musical descriptions" in the dataset are either. Anyway, an interesting notion. I wouldn't say this paper is "proof" of the notion, but it's harmless anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Gribs Posted July 29, 2012 Author Members Share Posted July 29, 2012 Yeah I see your point. I had never heard of the journal before. The math community is moving more towards this sort of thing and there are good and bad aspects. The bad is that {censored} can fly in under the radar but the good is that research can get out in the community for discussion before it gets old. A joke I used to hear a lot when I was a post doc was that the work was out of date by the time it appeared in a journal. If it was really of substance everyone knowledgeable in the field had heard of it and probably read a preprint or been to a talk about it. My plan is to use the paper as a source for some interesting reading material. This sort of thing is out of my field. I think it is interesting. I read about similar techniques being used for linquistics and machine translation quite some time ago so my impression is that the math is not really new at all. I would guess that the algorithms used are similar to those used by search engines and software that gives recommendations to customers (and other places for targeted marketing etc). It often happens that books written for the math community are research monographs and not really textbooks, but I have no clue about the books in the citations for this paper. As for studying music using the method I was also sort of iffy about that database. I have no clue whether it does a good job representing Western popular music, whether certain publishers opted out, etc. The questions raised by the article are interesting though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members pogo97 Posted July 29, 2012 Members Share Posted July 29, 2012 ... The bad is that {censored} can fly in under the radar ... Like all that nonsense about the "Mozart Effect." ------ I'm Editorial Assistant (secretary, really) of the journal Music Perception. When I started, twelve years ago, they were still using physical mail for the whole process of finding reviewers, sending out the papers, getting (and nagging for) the reviews etc. EEEK!!!! First thing I did was construct a tracking database that keeps track, generates emails, does reports etc. But it still takes three to four months because people don't always get to reviewing right away and sometimes they forget/get busy/get sick and have to be reminded. After all, reviewing is expected but unpaid work for academics. Sometimes authors get impatient but there's nothing we can do except nag. We occasionally get math and theory and philosophical articles but they rarely get sent out for review because the focus of the journal is experiment-based psychology, not abstract speculation. Sometimes I wonder if some authors have even read the journal to know what it's about before submitting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.