8 ms·
Analysis of Bach's information-dense music
- gumby 3y agoHere's the ArXiv link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00783.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00783.pdf
- vcg3rd 3y agoThank heavens I can now listen to Bach without fearing he may not be great. Now if "maths" can prove da Vinci was a great artist and Michelangelo a great sculptor and Shakespeare a great writer! Was this in need of "proof"? Read, for example http://www.ram.org/ramblings/books/the_eight.html http://www.ram.org/ramblings/books/the_eight.html If only Neville had proof it would have been a much better novel.
- pohl 3y agoThe NewScientist headline is terrible. I'm not even sure where in the paper they pulled that from. Maybe it was written by an LLM.
- chrisjj 3y ago> The NewScientist headline is terrible Indeed. Increasingly so is the New Scientist publication title.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- macrolocal 3y agoYou might be missing the point somewhat. With these methods, you could eg. test the vast swaths of potentially overlooked composers to see if any of them merit closer listening.
- dahart 3y agoVery highly unlikely. The method in the paper isn’t measuring quality or novelty or authenticity or listenability or anything useful for evaluating composers without listening to them. It’s measuring the compressibility of MIDI files. We already know that Bach is less compressible than Philip Glass, and more compressible that Charles Ives. The methods in this paper cannot tell you if a composer is boring or derivative, nor whether they’re fresh and innovative for their time. They also can’t tell you anything about a performance. I mean go ahead and try, I’m all for experimenting, but I predict that trying to apply this paper to looking for overlooked composers will be an exercise in sifting through noise, more effort than searching manually, and spending time writing code instead of listening to good music.
- memset 3y agoI think (have never tried) that analyzing the harmony and rhythm (can you quantify syncopation?) you’d have a good start at determining if a song is worth listening to.
- macrolocal 3y agoYou might be missing my point somewhat. :) First, the methods of the paper don’t have to be a Mendelssohn replacement to be useful. Second, if you don’t like that potential application, consider all the other predictive models that could benefit from these features.
- dahart 3y agoAnd likewise, you might be missing the point. This paper doesn’t really seem to add any useful knowledge to the corpus, and its methods are extremely unlikely to be useful at all for any of the purposes you are suggesting or imagining. We’ve already had gzip for a long time, and we already know it does not make a good predictive model for anything except storage space. Like I would totally agree that there’s value in predictive models. I just don’t think the work we’re commenting on is one of those, nor headed toward making one.
- Rochus 3y agoThe paper definitely doesn't "prove that Bach was a great composer". It's about something completely different. The title of the referenced article is BS.
- mp05 3y ago> Now if "maths" can prove da Vinci was a great artist Well there is that whole golden ratio thing, perhaps you've heard of it? While I personally find all of that a stretch, plenty of people find merit in it. And so far as JS Bach is concerned, it's pretty clear he was a mathematical thinker even if it wasn't necessary deliberate in his composing. Maybe it was? I don't know and don't really care because a casual listen makes it obvious. Western classical music at its core is built around Pythagorean temperament, so it stands to reason that some outgrowth of this system can be modeled using pure mathematics, does it not? I realize there are people who have contempt for Western music for various reasons, but I'd tell them to hate the game, not the player... it's not the music's fault that crappy culture manifested.
- dontreact 3y agoWhile neat and interesting, I think using information theory to analyze music can very easily fall flat especially when comparing across very different musical traditions. A relevant story for this: When Europeans came to Senegal they perceived the drumming as being irregular and chaotic. Through taking a class on this drumming I have been able to appreciate how much subtle time differences not represented by western music notation play a role in this music, and also how complex the rhythms are (even when just approximated via western music notation) Very often there is an implicit discretization that happens before these analyses of music are run and it’s easy to choose a wrong one or for there to not be an easy and human interpretable way of defining the domain of your probability distributions required for such an analysis. Another example: in pop music timbre plays a much bigger role than in classical music as artists have experimented with vocal styles, synthesizers, and many other ways of shaping sound which cannot be represented by classical music notation.
- goodguy29495 3y agono one's trying to compare across different traditions and your story is uncharitably critical of Europeans, could you pleases use a more ethnically neutral example in the future?
- dontreact 3y agoI would have if I could think of one. Also anyone would think those rhythms were chaotic if they had no cultural familiarity with them (including myself!), so I don’t see it as a criticism? Here’s an example of someone with a lot of twitter followers in the tech world using information theory to compare across different types of music: https://twitter.com/aidangomez/status/1749532024258412740 https://twitter.com/aidangomez/status/1749532024258412740
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> no one's trying to compare across different traditions Except that this is precisely what 18th century European musical theorists did, a practice that continues to the present day in some (not all) music education institutions. While you can certainly hear jokes made in Africa, India and Asia about various deficencies of European music, what you will not find on those continents is a dominant cultural practice of explaining the inherent superiority of their own musicking. And yes, it is also true that the culture that engages in this is but a single subset of European musical culture, but it also happens to be the dominant one, embraced by both the educational establishment and the elites across the continent. They may look down on certain Basque folk traditions as well as Gamelan and Carnatic traditions, but looking down is precisely what this European phenomena does whenever other traditions are under discussion.
- the_cat_kittles 3y agounles you have decades of domain expertise, chances are you are going to fail at analysing music in a meaningful way. stop thinking you can just waltz into this subject
- netr0ute 3y agoAlthough this might be true, it's pretty irrelevant if the kind of music you're analyzing didn't exist a few decades ago.
- kdfjgbdfkjgb 3y agocan you give an example of such music?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- netr0ute 3y agoModern bachata music didn't exist until 1994, so there's that.
- tomcam 3y agoHow many decades of domain expertise in music do you suggest one acquire before just waltzing into the subject?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agothree and a half.
- tomcam 3y agoDamnit. Given your pedigree I had you in the pool for 4 1/4
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
- Rochus 3y agoThe headline of the referenced NewScientist article has little to do with the paper and the findings. It's just a way to represent music (not even shure if it's new since I've seen such representations in the past). Finding appropriate representations is important to make progress with deep learning and DNNs to understand and generate music; today's approaches based on NLP and word embeddings are not able to properly represent music and its multidimensional complexities. But I don't assume that the model presented in the paper can represent this complexity, or the measured information is the most relevant one.
- gumby 3y agoYeah, I submitted the article under a different title for that reason. Doing so is discouraged, but it’s reasonable for a case like this.
- intalentive 3y agoShoot, just run it through gzip https://www.cs.bme.hu/~friedl/alg/knuth_song_complexity.pdf https://www.cs.bme.hu/~friedl/alg/knuth_song_complexity.pdf
- memset 3y agoI’m admittedly baffled by this article, and I’ve also skimmed the arxiv paper. I’ve formally studied music theory and Bach more than the average person. First, I’m not sure why the author has chosen to represent music as a graph showing the relationship between individual notes. Usually we analyze Bach in terms of harmony and the relationship between each chord. In fact, we don’t even care about chord names, we just care about the relative differences, which is why we use Roman numerals to analyze instead of note names. I think there is something interesting in using a graph to model voicings, but the example here seems to ignore the very methods Bach used to compose. To that end, we very much already know what Bach does to create tension and release or surpass the listener. It’s in the name, “deceptive cadence”. So I would have loved for this to have confirmed - or refuted! - something we already know. For example, to quantify for us why a V-vi cadence feels deceptive. But we never get there. We have a set of graph techniques applied to Bach’s music without much discussion of why we believe that way of modeling makes sense.
- fweimer 3y agoAfter reading Section A.1 (Data Collection and Network Construction), I wonder to what degree their analysis depends on MIDI encoding practices. For example, for a keyboard fugue, you could use one channel for the entire piece, one channel per voice, or one channel for each hand, with the voices moving between the two as a human player would play them. Apart from rare corner cases (especially in the WTCs), they would sound exactly the same, but I think their method generates very different networks for them. And MIDI files might be a recording of an actual performance (with all ornamentals played out, chords arpeggiated to varying degrees, etc.), or try to capture an urtext edition as accurately as possible (leaving much to interpretation).
- jacquesm 3y agoYou've - accidentally - hit on one of the biggest challenges I've been struggling with for pianojacq, the input of which is MIDI files, but MIDI files are quite lossy with respect to the original text as written, especially when it comes to ornaments. I'd like to recover those automatically to show them 'properly' but so far I haven't found a really good and reliable way to do this. Any ideas to get me unstuck would be most appreciated.