Thaindian News

London, Dec 18 (IANS) Can science predict which songs are more likely to become hits and chart busters? The process might not be all that far fetched, thanks to the latest algorithms.

Tijl De Bie, from the University of Bristol’s Intelligent Systems Lab, said: “Indeed, we have found the hit potential of a song depends on the era. This may be due to the varying dominant music style, culture and environment.”

De Bie and team looked at the official British top 40 singles chart over the past 50 years, seeking to distinguish the most popular (top five) songs from less popular singles (30 to 40), according to a Bristol statement.

They used musical features, such as tempo, time signature, song duration and loudness, besides devising a ‘hit potential equation.’ It works by looking at all the British hits for a certain time and measuring their audio features.

From this, researchers derived a list of weights, telling then how important each of the 23 features was and allowing them to compute a score for a song.

The team found they could classify a song into a ‘hit’ or ‘not hit’ based on its score, with an accuracy rate of 60 percent as to whether a song will make it to top five, or if it will never reach above position 30 on the British top 40 singles chart.