I saw that Nickelback just received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance with their song ‘Burn it to the Ground’ and wanted to celebrate the event. Since Nickelback is known for their consistent sound, I thought I’d try to remix their Grammy-nominated performance to highlight their awesome self-similarity. So I wrote a little code to remix ‘Burning to the Ground’ with itself. The algorithm I used is pretty straightforward:
- Break the song down into smallest nuggets of sound (a.k.a segments)
- For each segment, replace it with a different segment that sounds most similar
I applied the algorithm to the music video. Here are the results:
Considering that none of the audio is in its original order, and 38% of the original segments are never used, the remix sounds quite musical and the corresponding video is quite watchable. Compare to the original (warning, it is Nickelback):
Feel free to browse the source code, download remix and try creating your own.
December 3, 2009 at 2:08 pm |
That is now the most Nickelback I’ve ever listened to…
The video segmentation is great – I didn’t realize that this was so easy to do.
December 3, 2009 at 3:35 pm |
This is awesome.
I’m not sure I’d call the remix “quite musical,” though. Maybe “just as musical as the original” would be more accurate. :-)
December 3, 2009 at 3:50 pm |
This is awesome. It reminds me of an idea that I had for making a Nickelback detector (along the lines of your Journey detector): it would be a measure of homogeneity of an artist’s catalog.
Guess I should get coding…
December 3, 2009 at 5:32 pm |
Does that guy bleach his hair?
December 3, 2009 at 5:45 pm |
Don’t let your work fall into the wrong hands!
If Nicklebacks producers knew, they’d probably just generate a couple of new albums with it and call it a day.
December 3, 2009 at 6:53 pm |
Have you tried your algorithm on a music video that you DO like? My guess is that you will find that the results are similar. It’ll still sound vaguely like the original song.
December 4, 2009 at 5:02 am |
[...] Lippen erschienen. Musik-Blogger Paul Lamere wollte diesem fragwürdigen Ereignis auf seinem Blog Music Machinery sogar ein Denkmal setzen und beschäftigte sich dafür vorerst mit der gepriesenen Performance [...]
December 4, 2009 at 12:18 pm |
Awesome :) Any chance the same algorithm could be run using several songs from Nickelback’s catalog? I’d imagine the results would be much the same.
December 7, 2009 at 9:39 am |
Хуйня и издевательство. Всю музыкальность потерял по пути к “узникалиации” песни.
December 15, 2009 at 7:47 pm |
I hope you are familiar with the track Nickelback – How You Remind Me Of Someday.mp3? Someone realized that if you lined up 2 of Nickelbacks tracks next to each other and only adjusting tempo the songs lined up uncannily similar.
December 25, 2009 at 2:34 am |
Well, you proved that Nickleback’s music is boring, no matter how you slice it.
January 5, 2010 at 12:43 pm |
Markeyev, da? Mne voobscheto novaya versia nravitsa bolshe.
(Markeyev, really? I like the new version better.)
January 5, 2010 at 2:43 pm |
Nice!
I’d be interested in hearing the replacements from a larger sample catalog — not just the artists own. This depends a lot upon the “similarity” algorithm, as well as the size of the audio “nuggets”.
This is not quite Markovian analysis, which always gets more interesting with a larger sample.