Mercurial > hg > anatomy-of-the-charts

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 	<p>One does get a feeling that Donna Summer is somehow special. Among all artists with more than 8 hits, her tracks are by far the most percussive and rhythmically steady… she’s <i>so</i> Disco! <span class="caps">ABBA</span> have a softer touch of Disco, much less percussive, but often quite steady, whereas Elton John is revealed as seriously non-disco – despite his (rather late) 1979 attempt to cash in on the craze with <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Elton+John/Victim+Of+Love"><i>Victim of Love</i></a>.</p>

-	<p>But Elton and co had already had their share of the cake – there’s so much more to the 70s than Disco! Check back next week for “Clash of Attitudes” <span style="font-style: italic;">(edit: find it <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/23/anatomy-of-the-uk-charts-part-2-clash-of-attitudes">here</a>)</span>, the second part of our Anatomy of the UK Charts.</p>
+	<p>But Elton and co had already had their share of the cake – there’s so much more to the 70s than Disco! Check back next week for “Clash of Attitudes” <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>, the second part of our Anatomy of the UK Charts.</p>

 	<p><i></i></p><h4><i>Further Reading</i></h4><p></p><i>
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 <h5><abbr>Thursday, 23 June 2011</abbr></h5>

-<p class="mmemph">As promised <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">last week</a> our resident Research Fellow Matthias has been hard at work data-mining our music recordings for this new instalment of our Anatomy of the UK Charts series...</p>
+<p class="mmemph">As promised last week our resident Research Fellow Matthias has been hard at work data-mining our music recordings for this new instalment of our Anatomy of the UK Charts series...</p>

-<p>Not everyone is into dancing. As I showed you in <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">last week's post</a> our audio analysis algorithms can trace the rise of disco after 1974, but around that same time a colourful range of other new styles emerged, including hard rock, glam and art rock... and then there was that other genre: punk, the attitude-laden antidote to "established" music.</p>
+<p>Not everyone is into dancing. As I showed you in last week's post our audio analysis algorithms can trace the rise of disco after 1974, but around that same time a colourful range of other new styles emerged, including hard rock, glam and art rock... and then there was that other genre: punk, the attitude-laden antidote to "established" music.</p>

 <p>While we haven't actually come up with a measure of <i>attitude</i> in music, the fact that punk was the anti-establishment, non-musician's music made it relatively easy to track down... </p>

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 <p>Further on in our series we'll see that punk was not at all a passing fad, as we uncover the re-birth of simple music in the late 80s, on a scale that makes the 70s punk wave seem a mere ripple. Before that we'll dissect the early eighties in next week's instalment: "The Curse of the Drum Machine".</p>

 <div class="mmemph">
-<h3>See also</h3>
-<p><a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">Last week's instalment</a> of the Anatomy of the UK Charts series.</p>
-<p><a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/22/lyric-clouds-genre-maps-and-distinctive-words">Andy's beautiful images of lyrics by genre.</a></p>

 <h3>References and More Info</h3>
 <p>You can calculate your own Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients with the <a href="http://www.vamp-plugins.org/plugin-doc/qm-vamp-plugins.html">Vamp plugin software</a> developed at Queen Mary, University of London. A plugin for chroma is available <a href="http://isophonics.net/nnls-chroma">here</a>, or you can read <a href="http://ismir2010.ismir.net/proceedings/ismir2010-25.pdf">my paper</a> about it. Unfortunately, the complexity measure is not publicly available yet, but we will make an update once it is.</p>
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   <h5 class="subhead"><abbr class="published">Friday,  1 July 2011</abbr></h5>

     <div style="font-style: italic;">
-<p>This is the third part of the series, in which our Research Fellow Matthias analyses thousands of recordings from the UK singles charts using audio signal processing techniques. You can read <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">Part 1 here</a> and <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/23/anatomy-of-the-uk-charts-part-2-clash-of-attitudes">Part 2 here</a>.</p>
+<p>This is the third part of the series, in which our Research Fellow Matthias analyses thousands of recordings from the UK singles charts using audio signal processing techniques.
+<!-- You can read <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">Part 1 here</a> and <a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/23/anatomy-of-the-uk-charts-part-2-clash-of-attitudes">Part 2 here</a>.</p> -->
 </div>

 <p>How does music change over time? Does it get faster, more complex, more diverse? In the course of the last few weeks we have learned that many aspects of music don't seem to follow that kind of simple trend. Rather, changes happen in  less predictable ways. One of the most surprising examples of that emerged when we looked at the development of rhythm regularity in the UK charts...</p>
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 <p>In either case, if this hump is really related to drum machines and samplers, we'd expect to see the trend in other kinds of data as well.</p>

 <h3>The 120 bpm Tempo Crunch</h3>
-<p>As the 80s seems to have been an unusual time for rhythm, it would be no surprise if we also saw striking things in the tempo of 80s music. We ran our tempo tracking software on the whole charts collection to measure the tempo of each section of each track in beats per minute (bpm). We then picked a single bpm value for each song by choosing the one attached to the most seconds of audio. At a first glance a plot of the average tempo per year didn't look very interesting (you can see it <a href="http://blog.last.fm/images/150.png">here</a>). But then we noticed something unexpected. Have a look at the image below.</p>
+<p>As the 80s seems to have been an unusual time for rhythm, it would be no surprise if we also saw striking things in the tempo of 80s music. We ran our tempo tracking software on the whole charts collection to measure the tempo of each section of each track in beats per minute (bpm). We then picked a single bpm value for each song by choosing the one attached to the most seconds of audio. At a first glance a plot of the average tempo per year didn't look very interesting (you can see it <a href="./aotc3_files/150.png">here</a>). But then we noticed something unexpected. Have a look at the image below.</p>

 <img src="./aotc3_files/149.png">

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 <p>Next week, bring some some earplugs, as we will try to find out where all the racket comes from in <i>The White Noise Boys</i> [Edit: title changed to <i>Survival of the Flattest</i>].

 </p><div style="font-style: italic;">
-<h3>Anatomy of the UK Charts series so far</h3>
-<p><a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/16/percussiveness-and-the-disco-diva">Percussiveness and the Disco Diva</a> - on the rise of disco in the mid 70s</p>
-<p><a href="http://blog.last.fm/2011/06/23/anatomy-of-the-uk-charts-part-2-clash-of-attitudes">Clash of Attitudes</a> - on automatically telling punk from art rock</p>
-<p><a href="./aotc3_files/aotc3.html">The Curse of the Drum Machine</a> - this post</p>
 <h3>Further Reading</h3>
 <p>The original article on the Fluctuation Patterns feature is by Elias Pampalk, Simon Dixon, and Gerhard Widmer: <i>On the evaluation of perceptual similarity measures for music.</i> In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-03), pages 7–12, 2003.</p>
 <p>If you want to detect the tempo of a track automatically, try Matthew Davies's tempo tracker in the <a href="http://www.isophonics.net/QMVampPlugins">Queen Mary Vamp plugin</a> library or Simon Dixon's <a href="http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~simond/beatroot/">BeatRoot</a>.</p>