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Articles tagged with "music"

The problem with music recommendations

There's a popular song, written by an Argentinean musician called Charly García, called "Los Dinosaurios" ("The Dinosaurs"). The song was released in 1983 in the album "Clics Modernos", and you can listen to it in all its vinyl glory here.

This song represents for me an interesting problem: it is by far my favourite song from this author, and I would like to listen to something similar. But so far all recommendation systems have failed me. Here are some of the reasons why.

A first approach could be to pick something from the same author, or even the same album. This approach, sadly, doesn't work: while Charly García is certainly a prolific author, with 41 published records and countless guest appearances, his main style is oriented towards electronic music, and it doesn't really fit the style of this specific song. If anything, this song is more fitting for his earlier albums, which limits us quite a bit - out of those 41 soloist albums, "Clics Modernos" is the second one.

We could instead assume that this song was written in a certain context, and that looking at authors from a similar context we can obtain similar music. Again, this doesn't entirely work: if we pick "Argentinean songs from the 80's", we would end up with a list of songs that fit perfectly the style of the other 8 songs on this album, but not this one specifically^1. Grouping the song into "Latin American music", as some systems do, only exacerbates the problem: there is no relation at all between this song and, say, a Cuban bachata.

If we look at the actual lyrics, the situation gets even worse: "Los dinosaurios" is a thinly veiled critique of the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. A lyrics-based systems would most likely fail on two fronts: either it wouldn't understand the references made in the song and label it as "nonsense/fantastical", or it would understand the reference and recommend politically charged songs. Neither approach seems really right - while "The times they are a-Changin" could be a viable candidate for a recommendation, neither "The Revolution will not be televised" nor "Redemption song" fit the bill.

All of these approaches fail for the same reason: they apply a network-oriented measure to a song that doesn't fit the popular rhythm of the time and place in which it was produced, and which doesn't fit the overall style of the author either.

So what exactly am I looking for? A non-technical answer would be "I need a song that contains simple vocals, a piano as it's main instrument, and with raising tension towards the end". Or in the words of the author, a song that "adapts the English sound to Tango". As far as I know, the only system that applied a similarity measure capable of detecting this would be Pandora, but with their system closed to Europe, I cannot tell whether this works or not.

Footnotes

^1 How to obtain a digital archive of Argentinean songs from the early 80's is left as an exercise for the reader.

Related reading:

The Napoleon Dynamite problem.

Guitar music and I

Here's a joke I heard once at a music academy:

How do you keep a pianist from playing? You take away their music sheet.

How do you keep a guitarist from playing? You give them a music sheet.

This joke rings oh-so-true because it highlights a key point for those of us who tried to learn guitar by ourselves: the typical amateur guitar player doesn't know how to read music, and (s)he doesn't care about it. Somehow they manage, but how they do that remains a mistery to me.

Typical guitar tabs (those you buy at a shop or download from the internet) contain therefore little more than the lyrics for a song and the points at which you are supposed to switch from one chord to another. This works pretty well for your left hand, but how about the right one? Should I just move it up and down? And at which speed? "Well", says the guitar book, "you should just do whatever feels natural". This is of course useless - what am I, the song whisperer? What if nothing feels natural? Do I just sit there in silence?

Let's take the following example, which I borrowed from Ultimate-guitar.com

RHYTHM FOR INTRO AND VERSE:
    D                       G       A
E|--2--2-2-0-2---2-3-2-0-2--3--3-3--0--0--0-0-0-0-0---|
B|--3--3-3-3-3---3-3-3-3-3--3--3-3--2--2--2-3-2-2-2---|
G|--0--0-0-0-0---0-0-0-0-0--0--0-0--2--2--2-2-2-2-2---|
D|--------------------------2--2-2--0--0--0-0-0-0-0---|
A|--------------------------3--3-3--------------------|

INTRO
D   G  A   [play twice]

VERSE 1:
       D
You'll say
G      A           D
we got nothing in common
   G      A         D
no common ground to start from
    G       A      D     G  A
and we're falling apart

This is actually a fairly complete piece: it shows the lyrics and notes (lower half) along with an attempt at explaining how should the strumming (i.e., what to do with your right hand) be performed. But here's the thing: it's not clear at all which strokes should be "up" and "down", nor the duration and silences between them. You cannot derive rhytm from this information, which is pretty bad for a section titled "Rhytm for intro and verse". And here's an extra fact: the "D" section should actually be played exactly the same as the "G A" section, but good luck discovering that from this notation. This is a known bug of guitar tabs, and yet I have several books with songs that don't even include such a section, either because they don't care or because they realized it's useless.

This is one of those very few problems that is currently solved by, of all things, Youtube. It's not too hard to find a "How to play Breakfast at Tiffany's" video tutorial, where some dude will spend some time showing you slow motion strumming, so you can play the whole thing. But how come youtubers have fixed this problem so fast, while guitar books have remained the same for decades? Why isn't everybody complaining? My theory is that the typical amateur guitarist picks up a guitar, downloads one of these tabs, fails at getting anything out of it, and quits guitar forever saying "guitars are hard".

I don't really have a good solution, because any attempt at formalizing the strumming will undoubtedly require some knowledge about rhytm, and guitar players seem to hate that. Perhaps that's how we ended up in this mess in the first place. Or perhaps there's a super easy, totally intuitive method that I've always missed for one reason or another.

But then again: how can a method do any good if it's never taught?