Tuesday, February 26, 2008
I now have 31,654 tracks in my iTunes library, over twice as many as I had when I posted that song chart thing a couple of years ago. The question on everyone's lips now is undoubtedly - what's the distribution in length of these new songs? Closely followed, I imagine, by the related - how closely does the second half match the first? and - what implications does this have for humanity?. I can't answer the last of those questions with any authority, but I'm confident of being able to accurately deal with the first two.
Here's a chart compiling the lengths of every track between 0 and 15 minutes in length. Again, the distribution tails off after this, and there's nothing of interest to see in the high track-length region. The shortest track is now Otomo Yoshihide's Isuzu (0:00:13 - just over a tenth of a second!), the longest is the Vancouver New Music Society's epic 169 minute reading of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise.
Observations:
1. Both charts look pretty similar at first glance.
2. Ignoring for a moment the blip at 1:00 (caused by a collection of Fällt's invalidObject series), the most common track length is now exactly 3 minutes.
3. I have 243 tracks in my library lasting between 2:59:51 and 3:00:50 - over 12 hours of music.
4. There's an interesting little peak at the 10 minute mark. I suppose this is a result of the double figures of '10' being a psychological landmark for musicians - where no obvious verse-chorus-verse structure dictates the end of a song, it seems more worthy to fade out to give a nice big round number than a messy single-figure timing.
5. Other little peaks appear above the best-fit curve at other integer values - notably the aforementioned 1, then 2, 4, 5, 7, but not really 6 or 9 (if you're going to write a 9 minute song, might as well stretch it out to last 10, eh?). Again, I'm thinking this is purely psychological. There's something satisfyingly tidy about round numbers, and given the unstructured nature of lots of my music collection, precise timings are somewhat arbitrary.
So there we are. I'll report back when my collection passes the 60,000 mark.
Here's a chart compiling the lengths of every track between 0 and 15 minutes in length. Again, the distribution tails off after this, and there's nothing of interest to see in the high track-length region. The shortest track is now Otomo Yoshihide's Isuzu (0:00:13 - just over a tenth of a second!), the longest is the Vancouver New Music Society's epic 169 minute reading of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise.
Observations:
1. Both charts look pretty similar at first glance.
2. Ignoring for a moment the blip at 1:00 (caused by a collection of Fällt's invalidObject series), the most common track length is now exactly 3 minutes.
3. I have 243 tracks in my library lasting between 2:59:51 and 3:00:50 - over 12 hours of music.
4. There's an interesting little peak at the 10 minute mark. I suppose this is a result of the double figures of '10' being a psychological landmark for musicians - where no obvious verse-chorus-verse structure dictates the end of a song, it seems more worthy to fade out to give a nice big round number than a messy single-figure timing.
5. Other little peaks appear above the best-fit curve at other integer values - notably the aforementioned 1, then 2, 4, 5, 7, but not really 6 or 9 (if you're going to write a 9 minute song, might as well stretch it out to last 10, eh?). Again, I'm thinking this is purely psychological. There's something satisfyingly tidy about round numbers, and given the unstructured nature of lots of my music collection, precise timings are somewhat arbitrary.
So there we are. I'll report back when my collection passes the 60,000 mark.
