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.
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.
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. :-)
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…
Does that guy bleach his hair?
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.
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.
[...] 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 [...]
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.
Хуйня и издевательство. Всю музыкальность потерял по пути к “узникалиации” песни.
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.
Well, you proved that Nickleback’s music is boring, no matter how you slice it.
Markeyev, da? Mne voobscheto novaya versia nravitsa bolshe.
(Markeyev, really? I like the new version better.)
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.