Artificial Intelligence Analyzes Beatles’ Music Transformations b4in.org/a6Fl Music fans and critics know that the music of the Beatles underwent a dramatic transformation in just a few years, but until now there hasn’t been a scientific way to measure the progression. That could change now that computer scientists at Lawrence Technological University have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can analyze and compare musical styles, enabling research into the musical progression of the Beatles. Assistant Professor Lior Shamir and graduate student Joe George had previously developed audio analysis technology to study the vocal communication of whales, and they expanded the algorithm to analyze the albums of the Beatles and other well-known bands such as Queen, U2, ABBA and Tears for Fears. The study, published in the August issue of the journal Pattern Recognition Letters, demonstrates scientifically that the structure of the Beatles music changes progressively from one album to the next. The algorithm works by first converting each song to a spectrogram – a visual representation of the audio content. That turns an audio analysis task into an image analysis problem, which is solved by applying comprehensive algorithms that turn each music spectrogram into a set of almost 3,000 numeric descriptors reflecting visual aspects such as textures, shapes and the statistical distribution of the pixels. Pattern recognition and statistical methods are then used to detect and quantify the similarities between different pieces of music. In popular music, albums are widely considered milestones in the stylistic development of music artists, and these collections of songs provide a convenient unit for establishing measurements to quantify a band’s progression. LTU’s study analyzed 11 songs from each of the 13 Beatles studio albums released in Great Britain, and quantified the similarities between each song and all the others in the study. The results for the individual songs were then used to compare the similarities between the albums. The automatic placement of the albums by the algorithm was in agreement with the chronological order of the recording of each album, starting with the Beatles’ first album, “Please, Please Me,” and followed by the subsequent early albums, “With the Beatles,” “Beatles for Sale” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” More b4in.org/a6Fl
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:40:57 +0000
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