Clive,

Is the mathematical signature of popular songs a universal concept? What happens if you feed, say, bhangra into HSS? Are there mathematical song traits that are inherently appealing to humanity as a whole; does that mean there's an unconscious musical aesthetic ingrained in the human brain? They could do some fascinating evo-psych-style basic research with this program. Maybe even see if there's any difference in fMRI results between hit songs and B-sides.

Okay, now I'm sounding completely ridiculous. Too much coffee.

Ahahaha! No, those are really interesting questions. I think -- though I'm not sure -- that the A.I. guys who created Hit Song Science stuck mostly to Western pop music and Western classical music. But don't quote me on that; I'm not sure.

As to whether there are hardwired aspects to our musical aesthetic ... there are plenty of scientists who are investigating precisely that point! I recently met the neuroscientist Justine Meaux, whose Phd thesis was on rhythm -- how and why our brains are able to to hear a musical rhythm and tap along with it. No other animal can do that: Not chimps, not apes, not birds. She did a bunch of fMRI studies and was trying to work on precisely that question.

okay, the hit song science people are incredibly vague with what exactly there doing. everyone's impressed because they wave around some fancy lingo about "mathematical patterns" and "algorithms" but the way they analyze these patterns is crucial because there are so many different ways to look at data. isn't anyone else skeptical?

Well, the way HSS works is a two-step process. The first step is the decomposition of a song into its components -- i.e. the beat, the key, and about 20 or 30 other data points. The folks who make HSS won't tell anyone, including journalists like me, how that works; it's their Pepsi formula, as it were. So if one wanted to be skeptical, that'd be the place to do it -- because it's impossible to assess the validity of a technique the premises of which the inventors won't explain.

The second step of the HSS process is simpler: The software takes the decomposed song and checks to see how closely it "clusters" to other known clusters of hit songs. Clustering algorithms are pretty common in artificial intelligence, so I can believe that this part works pretty much as described.

But by all means, it's definitely worth casting a skeptical eye on any new invention -- particularly a secretive one!

This is nice to know. As of January 1st, Mike McCready is our manager. We are a Female fronted high energy rock band and we are based out of Tempe,AZ. We have built relations with FENDER and will be in the 2004 Fender Catalog.
We have recently been nominated for 3 awards by Badstain Records (PHX, AZ):

-Best Female
-Best New Song (101)
-Best New Artist

You can vote by email

skapunkawards@badstainrecords.com

The artical, nice work!

Keep your eye out for us...

www.girlkicksboyonline.com

Sincerely,
Stacey Funk

This is nice to know. As of January 1st, Mike McCready is our manager. We are a Female fronted high energy rock band and we are based out of Tempe,AZ. We have built relations with FENDER and will be in the 2004 Fender Catalog.
We have recently been nominated for 3 awards by Badstain Records (PHX, AZ):

-Best Female
-Best New Song (101)
-Best New Artist

You can vote by email

skapunkawards@badstainrecords.com

The artical, nice work!

Keep your eye out for us...

www.girlkicksboyonline.com

Sincerely,
Stacey Funk

ps Mary needs to read the artical a little closer so that she understands the concept...
Someone GET MARY ANOTHER CUP.

Cool -- great to hear from you! Good luck with everything! Great web site too, BTW.

Nice site. thx.

When a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

But variables get one benefit people do not

why not je suis un chien Arf ! Arf ! c'est le rap qu'il faut bande de baltringues pourquoi vous faites les narco?

SEXO EN LO PRADO

you should have some hit songs of thi year