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Million Song Dataset

millionsongdataset.com

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Re: Million Song Dataset

#11
post #7
post #5

I think this Dataset is probably unfortunately most famous for an incredibly flawed but very headlineable attempt, which you've almost certainly seen somewhere, by a group of researchers from AI and related fields (none of which had musical qualifications) to "objectively" determine if music has gotten worse over the decades. As usual, they arrived at the conclusion that it did by computing a vague number ("timbral d…

Are you angry because that's not the conclusion you personally want to see?

There is nothing that makes music inherently "good" or "bad". Music is an artistic expression, and different values can be obtained from it on a person to person basis. Just because music is complex does not mean it is guaranteed to be popular.

That is exactly what the researchers were doing.

They obviously do not understand music, its values, or its influence on society.

Re: Million Song Dataset

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you angry because that's not the conclusion you personally want to see?

There is nothing that makes music inherently "good" or "bad". Music is an artistic expression, and different values can be obtained from it on a person to person basis. Just because music is complex does not mean it is guaranteed to be popular. That is exactly what the researchers were doing. They obviously do not understand music, its values, or its influence on society.

And good or bad is not related to popular.

Re: Million Song Dataset

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you angry because that's not the conclusion you personally want to see?

No, I think the poster is bothered by how absurd and unscientific such a pursuit is. It proposes that perhaps the people who made this dataset don't actually know anything about music, and are just nerds. This behavior is a common form of malpractice in composing data sets such as these.

"Worse" might be subjective but if they analyzed the data and found decreasing complexity of harmony and song structure, then that's not what I would call "unscientific".

For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" (for lack of a better word). The data backs this up. Whether you like that or not is subjective.

Re: Million Song Dataset

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think the poster is bothered by how absurd and unscientific such a pursuit is. It proposes that perhaps the people who made this dataset don't actually know anything about music, and are just nerds. This behavior is a common form of malpractice in composing data sets such as these.

"Worse" might be subjective but if they analyzed the data and found decreasing complexity of harmony and song structure, then that's not what I would call "unscientific". For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" (for lack of a better word). The data backs this up. Whether you like that or not is subjective.

This is such nonsense it's just incredible that people with such seemingly strong conversational strengths in music could say something so perversely false.

If you are looking at the kind of music that makes it onto Top 40 radio stations, then this is undoubtedly true. But that's not what is meant when you say

> For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland"

When you suggest that, you appear naive and ignorant. Because it means you don't know about Tyshawn Sorey [0], Mary Halvorson [1], Anthony Braxton [2], John Zorn [3], etc.

Pop music, a tiny sliver of all the important music being composed and performed today, has gotten progressively shittier. Fine, I'll grant you that. But who cares? That's not what we're talking about when examining the vast complexities being propagated and explored by today's musical masters. We are in a golden age of harmonic and compositional innovation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqw-HE9szrs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfK0ZfbLRA (featuring Nels Cline, who is actually much more important for his participation in the NYC avant-garde than for his involvement with Wilco) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNJfU0AJK2c [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYis3q0vv7g

Re: Million Song Dataset

#17

Does this data set have a collection of chords in text? I'd love something like it.

The dataset is a bunch of SQLite files, so shouldn't be too tricky to interrogate.

You can get a subset (static.echonest.com/millionsongsubset_full.tar.gz), which is 1.8Gb compressed. The full dataset is 280Gb, and AFAICT, this does not contain the full audio.

There's a script on GitHub from like 8 years ago that apparently can get you the audio (but I would be super-impressed if that actually still works).

You can see a description of one song here: http://millionsongdataset.com/pages/example-track-descriptio...

Re: Million Song Dataset

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Worse" might be subjective but if they analyzed the data and found decreasing complexity of harmony and song structure, then that's not what I would call "unscientific". For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" (for lack of a better word). The data backs this up. Whether you like that or not is subjective.

This is such nonsense it's just incredible that people with such seemingly strong conversational strengths in music could say something so perversely false. If you are looking at the kind of music that makes it onto Top 40 radio stations, then this is undoubtedly true. But that's not what is meant when you say > For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" When you suggest that, you appear naive and…

Thanks for mentioning Wilco, because I wouldn't just stop at harmonic and compositional innovation. Songwriters and big-tent performers are as good as they ever were as well. I had the pleasure of seeing them Oct 8 here in Toronto and it was fantastic. I'd also mention Willie Nelson/Avett Brothers/Matt Mays and Tame Impala all this summer. I'd dreamed of making it down to Red Rock, CO to see Jason Isbell last month, but it didn't materialize.

There's no shortage of worthy and soulful music. And it's more accessible than ever.

Maybe there's just more music in general, and that is easily mistaken as a consensus rather than just all-around growth.

Re: Million Song Dataset

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Worse" might be subjective but if they analyzed the data and found decreasing complexity of harmony and song structure, then that's not what I would call "unscientific". For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" (for lack of a better word). The data backs this up. Whether you like that or not is subjective.

This is such nonsense it's just incredible that people with such seemingly strong conversational strengths in music could say something so perversely false. If you are looking at the kind of music that makes it onto Top 40 radio stations, then this is undoubtedly true. But that's not what is meant when you say > For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" When you suggest that, you appear naive and…

I wouldn't say pop music has gotten worse. Maybe popular music, but not pop as a genre. There's a lot of great pop out there.

Re: Million Song Dataset

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think the poster is bothered by how absurd and unscientific such a pursuit is. It proposes that perhaps the people who made this dataset don't actually know anything about music, and are just nerds. This behavior is a common form of malpractice in composing data sets such as these.

"Worse" might be subjective but if they analyzed the data and found decreasing complexity of harmony and song structure, then that's not what I would call "unscientific". For the past 30 years music has definitely become more "bland" (for lack of a better word). The data backs this up. Whether you like that or not is subjective.

It's tempting to think one can come up with objective measures of musical complexity, but the problem is the number of dimensions musical complexity exists in:

Many people who listen to classical (in the more general sense of the word that encompasses baroque and romantic eras as well) dislike folk music as being too simple. They are listening to harmonic complexity - the changing of chords over time. Irish music usually has two or three chords repeated in a predictable pattern. But it has micro complexity - subtleties of emphasis, timing, melodic variation, grace notes, etc. - that make it, to my mind, far more complex than it is given credit for. These intricacies are particularly difficult to measure objectively.

Other kinds of music, like EDM, rap, etc. have rhythmic complexity. Fans of this music often think classical music is boring because classical tends to be rhythmically predictable.

Within classical music, there is Classical (Mozart era), which values balanced form, strictly following structures like AABA, with the complexity hiding within the endings and transitions between repeated sections.

This is very different from baroque (Bach, etc.), which often has rambling forms, and lots of micro complexity - dazzling changes of chords and keys, very intricate harmonies.

I won't even go into modern "serious" music, which stretches the definition of music to its breaking point.

The point being, there are as many forms of complexity possible as there are variables you can control in creating a piece of music.

I suspect this actually brushes up on fundamental limits of measuring complexity such as the Halting Problem in a currently only vaguely defined sense.

Edit:

To give a more direct listing of variables an algorithm might want to attempt to measure complexity in, off the top of my head, we have:

Chords, melody, polyphany, timbre, phrase structure, rhythm, rubato, dynamics, movement/song structure, whole piece/album structure, rhyme scheme, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, vocabulary size, word repetition, references to other musical or verbal phrases in other works...

I mean, people get PHDs in analyzing this stuff.

Edit again:

Here's one really specific example that highlights both the fun and difficulty of doing this stuff algorithmically: there's a piece Bach wrote where one person reads the page right side up, and the other reads it upside down (starting from the other end, all notes inverted), and it works out. Noticing patterns like that would take a highly sophisticated algorithm akin to what is used to analyze genetic sequences.

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