July 16, 2004
The shape of a song
Here's an incredibly cool app: The Shape of a Song. Load the MIDI file of any song into it, and it'll scan for repeating passages. Then it draws a arch connecting each repetition together. The more passages that repeat -- and the more frequently they repeat -- the more arches there'll be. As the designer, Martin Wattenberg, notes:
By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.
This is particularly interesting in light of my blog posting a month ago that asked the question "is music like language?", and described the work of a physicist who compared the grammar of various types of music. He discovered that "difficult", atonal music has less repetition in it, which is pretty much what you'd expect -- since repetition is partly how a piece of music creates meaning. He singled out Schoenberg's opening movement from "Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11" as particularly challenging. I'd love to find the MIDI file for that song, load it into this program, and see what patterns it produces -- or doesn't. How many arches would it produce?
By the way, the song illustrated above is "Hold On" by Yes. Yeah, yeah, shut up.
Posted by Clive Thompson at July 16, 2004 02:37 PM
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Huh, cool app. Unfortunately most midi files don't hold up to the real thing. I'm forced to wonder how much the complexity of the actual song can be seen in the midi file of it.
Yes, most MIDI files sound like absolute crap -- because it never captures the uniqueness of a performance. It reduceds a song to its absolute Platonic essence: Just basic data about what note occurs when and for how long. But so long as the song has reasonably coherent melodies, MIDI would, I think, accurately reflect its structure, which is all this application is trying to represent.
Don't worry Clive: prog is the new punk.
You know, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Tortoise, post-rock instrumental textures. The whole 9 yards..
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