Am reading a big music information retrieval paper purportedly studying trends in musical complexity over time. But then you get in there and the data set is comprised entirely of MIDI files. So this is not a study of music, this is a study of the aspects of music that can be notated. - ThreadSky

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ethanhein.bsky.social • 11 days ago

Am reading a big music information retrieval paper purportedly studying trends in musical complexity over time. But then you get in there and the data set is comprised entirely of MIDI files. So this is not a study of music, this is a study of the aspects of music that can be notated.

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agaensler.bsky.social•6 days ago

Great article. Well articulated.

ethanhein.bsky.social•11 days ago

You will be shocked to learn that classical music and jazz are more complex than other genres and that music has been getting simpler over time across all genres... if you are studying the aspects of music that someone saw fit to notate and/or encode as a MIDI file (essentially the same thing.)

ethanhein.bsky.social•11 days ago

This data set includes a lot of rap songs. How do you represent a rap song in MIDI form? Well, you take the elements of the track that use piano-key pitches and notate them. That does not convey much of the information of interest about a rap song.

ethanhein.bsky.social•11 days ago

I think it's fine to conduct corpus studies of MIDI files, but then you aren't studying music, you are studying scores and everything in the title and abstract of your paper needs to make that clear.

ethanhein.bsky.social•11 days ago

And if your team of data scientists is going to study music, I beg you to have a musician on the team

ethanhein.bsky.social•11 days ago

This is all going in a MusicRadar column

ethanhein.bsky.social•6 days ago

Update: here's the column https://www.musicradar.com/artists/is-pop-music-really-being-dumbed-down-what-the-science-actually-says

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