The idea is similar to one pursued by French author Georges Polti, whose 1921 work, The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations, sought to identify the basic patterns into which any successful literary situation fits -- from No.1, "Supplication," to No.36, "Loss of Loved Ones." (Hit Song Science, not surprisingly, refers to Polti on its Web site.)
"But I hear myself accused, with much violence," Polti wrote, "of an intent to `kill imagination!'"
And yet 80 years later, Terry Rossio, who won an Academy Award as co-author of the animated film Shrek, reports on his Web site, wordplayer.com, that he used Polti when stuck on a project: "It was enormously helpful for us to consult this list and recognize we were doing No. 6B1, `A Monarch Overthrown,' combined with No. 23, `Necessity of Sacrificing Loved Ones.' It helped crystallize our thinking, and led to the plot we are now writing."
But few would attribute the success of any Hollywood film to Polti's formulas, and according to McCready, the same is true of Hit Song Science. For a song to be a hit, it has to sound like a hit and it has to be marketed like a hit -- but it also needs those magic patterns. The first two require costly guesswork. The third, if they could be discovered, might simply minimize the costs.
The British neurologist Dr. Semir Zeki is at the forefront of a field he calls neuroaesthetics and others call blasphemy. In the soon-to-be-released anthology Neurology of the Arts: Painting, Music, Literature (Imperial College Press), he contributes a chapter in which he argues that art is a human activity with a biological basis, ultimately dependent upon -- and obedient to -- the laws of the brain.
He was unfamiliar with Hit Song Science, but supported, in theory, the idea that an algorithm could define popular art. "The brain's capacities are not infinite," he said on the phone from London. "There is a finite number of ways in which music can appeal. You get rid of discordant sounds at the beginning. You keep getting rid of the obvious and soon you're down to a reasonable number."
Zeki, too, has heard people get quite upset at his work's implication. "People say, `You cannot reduce beauty to a formula!'" he says. "But the fact that I know what happens in my brain when I see something as beautiful will not stop me from seeing it as so."
Or as McCready puts it, "We didn't invent these patterns. We just point them out."
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