We use results from the 2011 MIREX “Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval” task for a meta analysis of the hub phenomenon. Hub songs appear similar to an undesirably high number of other songs due to a problem of measuring distances in high dimensional spaces. Comparing 17 algorithms we are able to confirm that different algorithms produce very different degrees of hubness. We also show that hub...

Studies have shown that some musical pieces may preferentially activate reward centers in the brain. Less is known, however, about the structural aspects of music that are associated with this activation. Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected ev...

OBJECTIVE To perform a comprehensive content analysis of substance use in contemporary popular music. DESIGN We analyzed the 279 most popular songs of 2005 according to Billboard magazine. Two coders working independently used a standardized data collection instrument to code portrayals of substance use. OUTCOME MEASURES Presence and explicit use of substances and motivations for, associati...

Users interact a lot with their personal music collections, typically using standard text-based interfaces that offer constrained functionalities based on assigned metadata or tags. Alternative visual interfaces have been developed, both to display graphical views of music collections that attempt to reflect some chosen property or organization, or to display abstract visual representations of ...

In audio based music similarity, a well known effect is the existence of hubs, i.e. songs which appear similar to many other songs without showing any meaningful perceptual similarity. We verify that this effect also exists in very large databases (> 250000 songs) and that it even gets worse with growing size of databases. By combining different aspects of audio similarity we are able to reduce...

Digital music applications have become an increasingly popular means of listening to music. Applications such as Spotify allows the user to add songs to his/her playlist without downloading the song to his/her computer. The user can also be recommended songs by Spotify through Spotify’s “Discover" option. Pandora— an online radio—generates a radio station based on a single user-inputted artist,...

Herein, we examine the development and measurement of musical creativity. Musical creativity has been valued in what students bring with them and develops as students’ mature, and yet to an educator this development mode remains tacit and phenomological. Past studies of creative musical behaviors encompassed spontaneous behaviors, composition, and improvisation. Musical creativity resides in Ch...

In this article a multidimensional environment is defined to allow the exploration of musical content in a novel way by means of three-dimensional interfaces. The environment is created so that musical content can be located in a comprehensive space in which the world coordinates are related to music genres. To this end, the songs in a database are analyzed, and a description of their spectral ...

Rap music has been at the center of concern about the potential harmful effects of violent media on youth social behavior. This article explores the role of changing images of violence in rap music lyrics from the 1970s to the 1990s. The results indicate that there has been a dramatic and sustained increase in the level of violence in rap music. The percentage of songs mentioning violence incre...

Music audio structure segmentation has been a task in the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) since 2009. In 2010, five algorithms were evaluated against two datasets (297 and 100 songs) with an almost exclusive focus on western popular music. A new annotated dataset significantly larger in size and with a more diverse range of musical styles became available in 2011. This n...