This is where we turned it up to 11

September 26, 2014 4:05 PM

Where is the Drama takes any song input recognized by Spotify and analyses it to find the 30 seconds or so of highest drama, defined as the portion of the song with the largest increase in loudness.

Paul Lamere of The Echonest (and musicmachinery.com ) produced the new web app at the Berlin Music Hack Day.

"The app grabs the detailed audio analysis for the song from The Echo Nest. This includes a detailed loudness map of the song. This is the data I use to find the drama. To do so, I look for the part of the song with the largest rise in volume over the course of a 30 second window (longer songs can have a bit of a longer dramatic window). I give extra weight to crescendos that culminate in louder peaks (so if there are two crescendos that are 20dB in range but one ends at 5dB louder, it will win). Once I identify the most dynamic part of a song, I pad it a bit (so we get to hear a bit of the drop after the build)."

There's more details on the original post and follow up post, but the proof as they say is in the pudding. As one of the commenters says, it correctly identifies the drum fill from 'In the Air Tonight' and the beginning of the guitar solo in 'Stairway to Heaven' so I'm going to go ahead and call it a success.

(Also in the hackiest of ingenious hacks it uses a play 4'33" command as a stop button)

posted by TwoWordReview (27 comments total)

I can't get it to make any noise at all. The tracks I'm trying play fine in the Spotify web player. I guess other people are having better luck?
posted by aubilenon at 4:20 PM on September 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

It doesn't play the song itself on the page, just does a link that launches the song directly in the Spotify player at the target time.
posted by evilangela at 4:22 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

I guess that doesn't work with the spotify web player. At least, it doesn't for me.

'sokay. I can just play along with my local copies of the same media.
posted by aubilenon at 4:26 PM on September 26, 2014

The correct moment of "Come Sail Away" is just barely in his window. Half credit.
posted by escabeche at 4:27 PM on September 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Quantify my aesthetics for $300, please, Alex?
posted by spitbull at 4:27 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

"Won't Get Fooled Again" can't fool the algorithm either.

Now I want to see it used for classical music.
posted by spitbull at 4:30 PM on September 26, 2014

escabeche: “The correct moment of ‘Come Sail Away’ is just barely in his window. Half credit.”

Just an educated guess: the moment of highest drama in "Come Sail Away" comes about thirty seconds after the song ends when it fades from your immediate memory, right?

Or maybe that's just the moment associated with the song that I happen to enjoy most personally.
posted by koeselitz at 4:31 PM on September 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

KEYBOARD SOLOS AT DAWN
posted by escabeche at 4:33 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Paradise by the Dashboard Light gets pretty dramatic at "What's it going to be, boy: yes or no?" sayeth the site. I submit that trying to find the most dramatic part of a Jim Steinman composition is like deciding to look at the sun and identify the brightest bit.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:42 PM on September 26, 2014 [12 favorites]

This is a really narrow and limited view of creating drama in music. The app does a good job in measuring what it measures, but what it measures isn't really what they say is being measured.
posted by lownote at 4:58 PM on September 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

This is a really narrow and limited view of creating drama in music. The app does a good job in measuring what it measures, but what it measures isn't really what they say is being measured.
posted by lownote at 7:58 PM on September 26

Eponycorrect.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:39 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

I call FAIL on "Strawberry Letter 23."
posted by Mothlight at 6:07 PM on September 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

For quacky formalism, this is piddling, and too obvious to fool many people into taking it very seriously. A bigger and not-so-obvious example of this kind of thing, though, is Pandora.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 6:39 PM on September 26, 2014

Just an educated guess: the moment of highest drama in "Come Sail Away"....

It's just Dennis DeYoung saying "lads" over & over again.

seriously, who the hell actually says lads?
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:46 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Wow, so someone actually wrote a piece of software to answer this question.
posted by emptythought at 6:53 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Correctly identified WHEN I WAS! A YOUNG BOY! MY FATHER! TOOK ME INTO THE CITY...
posted by pony707 at 8:10 PM on September 26, 2014

Danger Zone

Boat Drinks

Gangam Style

Shake It Off

Blue Bayou

Bohemian Rhapsody
posted by newper at 8:28 PM on September 26, 2014

Where is the drama? Not available in Canada on the first song I tried, apparently. Even though I can, in fact, play that song in Canada on Spotify.
posted by chrominance at 8:38 PM on September 26, 2014

Paying your H.P. demands forever ...... is the start of the downside of the drama, not the start of the peak of it.
posted by blucevalo at 8:49 PM on September 26, 2014

Spotify has some interesting things in the works with Echonest's vast metadatabase. Check out FiveThirtyEight's beta test of a feature that's supposed to help you distinguish between the music you think you like, and the music you actually listen to most often: Spotify Knows Me Better Than I Know Myself
posted by Rhaomi at 10:57 PM on September 26, 2014

The Velvet Underground - White Light, White Heat - "That track is way too dramatic for me. Try another." - Epic Win!
posted by marienbad at 2:17 AM on September 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Aqua - Barbie girl. Well I have no idea if it is right or not but it looks like a cool graph and I am a sucker for a cool graph.
posted by marienbad at 2:21 AM on September 27, 2014

Right, it could be called "where does it get loud the longest?"

Of course "Where's the melodrama?" Is what is needed for most pop.

And the answer of course is always "in your pants."
posted by spitbull at 4:05 AM on September 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHYYYYYYYYYYYY
posted by HeroZero at 6:57 AM on September 27, 2014

HONEY I KNOW I KNOW TIMES ARE CHANGIN
posted by HeroZero at 7:00 AM on September 27, 2014

I inputted "Madness" by Muse and got the following response:

"That track is way too dramatic for me. Try another."
posted by jscalzi at 7:11 AM on September 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Solsbury Hill has a hill in the graph. Who'd have thunk it?
posted by arcticseal at 7:31 AM on September 27, 2014