If a lot of music by manufactured bands sounds tediously similar these days, things may soon get a lot worse.
A Spanish company says it has developed software to replace talent spotters that will "listen" to music and predict a song's chances of becoming a hit.
The software, Hit Song Science, has been developed by Polyphonic HMI of Barcelona to help record companies determine the chart potential of a song before deciding whether to invest in promoting it, New Scientist says.
It works by matching a song against the musical traits of known hits, searching for identified patterns in beat, melody, pitch, chord progression, harmonic variation and fullness of sound.
Polyphonic HMI has built up a database of 3.5 million songs and discovered that even though their traits are scattered all over the map, the hits are concentrated into a tiny number of trait clusters.
"There are a limited number of mathematical formulas for hit songs," New Scientist quotes the company's chief executive, Mike McCready, as saying. "We don't know why."
Five major record companies have shown interest in the software because, says Polyphonic HMI, it picked out the music of jazz singer Nora Jones months before it became a success. She walked away with eight Grammy awards last month for her first album. Songs with matching traits do not always sound the same, though.
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