Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

After about three months of gigging in a band and dealing with the in’s and out’s of the bottom levels of the music industry, I’m starting to realize that I’m doing something wrong.  By that mostly I mean that expectations and reality are kind of far apart.  There’s a sea change happening in the music business now, which in some ways is a really good thing, but it also really changes the definition of what it means to be successful as a musician.  It’s important to understand this change and not to get caught up in old ways of thinking.

The basic things that have changed are easy to consider:

• Downloadable music has dropped the price of distribution to almost zero.  This probably also happened in the early days of radio.
• The cost of producing new music is low enough that the supply of music is essentially infinite and the barrier to entry to being a musician is probably lower now than ever.
• People’s appetite for music has doubled but cant really increase because listening to music takes time and there’s only so much time.  A given person can only have maybe five favorite bands at a time, and there the number of social divisions of people is probably on the order of a hundred.

So there will still be good musicians and bad musicians and the bad acts will never get very far.  But even in the good acts, success will be determined by who has the connections and can build the most effective promotional machine.  There are so many people who want to be rock stars that climbing this hill is going to be a long and expensive proposition.

When I started playing music at age 17 I did it because I loved certain songs and I loved the way songs could bring out feelings - sometimes feelings that you didn’t know existed.  Playing music was something I did because I just liked it.

The thing about music - like a lot of other pursuits - is that you can always get better.  You start playing songs, and then you want to write songs, and then you want to play your songs for other people.  This feeling of improvement is addictive because there’s no limit to how far you can go and it drives a lot of the desire to play music, at least for me.

There’s also an aura about musicians that makes them seem different from other people - they are more individualistic, more expressive, more free, more important than the rest of us.  When I started I didn’t really think about this consciously, because I saw the fun that people who were playing music were having and I wanted to experience that feeling of fun, of flow.  But I also wanted a little of the musician’s aura to rub off on me - maybe to make me a little cooler, a little more interesting, a little more valuable. 

The problem with wanting the rock star aura is that in order to be a star you have to have fans, and in order to have fans, you have to entertain people.  The quickest way to do that is to re-cycle some tried and true musical product that may not have anything to do with who you are.  Cover bands can be very effective at entertaining, and playing covers can be just as much fun as playing originals, but it’s not really art anymore.

So why do so many people want to be rock stars?  Is it because we want to be artists and have people recognize and appreciate our unique artistic message?  Do we want to entertain people and make them groove and have a good time?  Or do we want to have a tough bad boy/rock star image so we can get laid more?

It’s probably a little of all of these things.  The interesting thing is that the Artist/Entertainer/Rockstar goals are all a little different.

To be an artist, you might be willing to perfect your craft in solitude and maybe have a few friends appreciate it.  It doesn’t really matter if people get it because it’s a true expression of who you are.  And with myspace and youtube it’s easy to put yourself out there.

For me though, it’s a lot of work to perfect a song, and if we’re not going to play a show ever, it’s just not worth the effort.  I play in a couple of jam bands, and we have fun every couple of weeks.  It’s pretty low pressure - show up, have a few beers, play some songs and no worries.  But I don’t really practice for these jam sessions because there’s no pressure and no one will really care if I screw something up here and there.

Once you decide to play a show, you absolutely have to try to entertain people though.  And the side effect of that is that you have to change your artistic vision sometimes to be able to get people moving.  Even worse is that most places we’d want to play out depend on alcohol sales to stay in business, so you have to bring a crowd of people who are going to drink, which may not be who you really intend to play for at all.

Then after you’ve played a gig and no one comes up to talk to you and say that they liked your stuff, you begin to feel like you’re not getting through… 

I think what I really need is to find a way to play for fun with people around and not really having the pressure to make people show up and buy a lot of drinks…

Something strange was happening last time when we looked at the probability that two words occur together on the same page.  It appeared that even distantly related concepts appeared to have joint probabilities hundreds of times higher than chance.

To figure out what is going on I’ve compiled a list of how many pages come up on google doing a single word search for about 50,000 words.  Here are some significant entries:

and 5140000000
the 4790000000
reserved 4300000000
copyright 4200000000
home 3880000000
or 3700000000
not 3660000000
s 3520000000
are 3400000000
an 3280000000
that 3090000000
search 3090000000
page 3040000000
…
projectile 5450000
pert 5450000
partake 5450000
linguist 5450000
devolution 5450000
Reba 5450000
Grimaldi 5450000
sleepwear 5440000
…
mechanizer 585
fraternizer 575
acclaimer 557
entrammel 552
baulker 543
rumourmonger 520
homoeotherm 502
enfranchize 478
harmoniousnesses 340
humourer 279
vialful 278
arithmetise 250
non-sympathiser 115
shakeably 46

Amusingly, this web page will now have a 2% increase in the occurance of the word “shakeably” on the web.
Yesterday’s calculations were based on pages with the word ‘the’, though it seems like ‘and’ would have been a better choice to find more pages with English.

Today went and saw my sister and had a light dinner with my folks.  They were happy to see me.

Song of the day - “Now Three” by Vienna Teng. 

City fast asleep.
Clouds up on the hill.
So quiet, so still.  

Dreams of rain in sheets,
dreams of ice and wings.
So delicate, these things.

Love, Love, Love is a word so small
Let it fill me up, up, up ’til I can’t see at all
I want to be blind
only my hands to guide me
Bring all of you inside me

City fast asleep
Lights hum in the gray
like her breathing will someday
Strangest beauty cries
one and one, by and by
now three of us here lie

Love, Love, Love for one so small
come fill me up up up ’til I can’t see at all
I want to be blind,
only my hands to guide me.
Gather all the world inside me.

 

 

 

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about love and where to find it.  In classes, in bars, at work I see a lot of single people who are looking for love.  (I also see a lot of people in relationships who are checking around to see if there’s anything better, but that’s another story).

There are a lot of dimensions to love - sex, romance, marriage - but the one I’m interested in the most these days is simple interest and attention.  Who pays attention to whom and why? 

Physical Attractiveness 

Everyone understands the importance of physical attractiveness.  Attractive people make us feel good when we look at them - we want to keep looking, maybe even turn our heads when they pass by.  In contrast ugly people make us cringe, even if only subconsciously. 

Shortage of Attention to Give

Surely not everyone is equally attractive.  But even if everyone got gradually more and more attractive, there wouldn’t necessarily be more attention to go around.  People’s ability to give attention is probably fairly fixed - so being more attractive just makes it possible for you to take attention away from someone else. 

Attention in Myspace

In any communication medium messages are directional.  Whether it is a phone conversation or email, someone usually initiates a conversation.  Sometimes these attempts to initiate work and sometimes they bounce…  In any case, we can say that the initiating party seeks the attention of the other party.  We could draw a graph where people are nodes and initiations are directed arcs.

What would such a graph tell us about our society?

We would probably find that there are a couple categories of people:

• Stars: people who receive more attention than they can possibly return
• Social butterflies: people who seek out lots of attention
• Average people: who give and receive a medium attention
• Recluse: people who give and receive little attention

You could rate people based on the total attention they receive, or based on the ratio of attention received to attention given out.  As a social engineering experiment, we might find the following:

• Every star creates several wallflowers because they soak up the limited available attention from many people.
• If you want to help with the global attention shortage, give out more attention than you receive.

The last principle is easily misapplied.  When I’m thinking of pay more attention to people, I immediately think of the most interesting or attractive people around - the sort of low-grade rock stars of my world.  I have to remember to pay attention to others.

Now that *is* interesting.  Attention from some people is desireable, but others not so much.  Maybe what matters is not the total attention that’s available to go around, but the attention available from attractive interesting people.  If we increase the number of these people, we might get somewhere.

If letters make words, then words make thoughts.  One way to try to represent relationships between words is to look at how often they occur together on web pages.  We can get an estimate of this by looking at page counts in search engines.

Pages of English

First we need an idea how many pages contain English sentences.  A search for the term “a*” produces about 15 trillion, but many of these are pages which do not contain english sentences.  A search for the word “the” returns about 4.8 trillion, which is probably a better estimate of the number of pages containing english.  We may have missed quite a few, but we will be close. 

Is George Bush a Maniac?

Here’s a simple example using the words “George Bush” and “Maniac”.

• A google search for “George Bush the” returns 165 million pages.  This is a probability of about 3.4e-5.
• “maniac the” returns 2.75million, or a probability of 5.7e-7
• The joint probability if the two terms were independent is about 2e-11, which should produce about 94 pages.
• Instead we get 545k pages, which is 5.7e3 times more combined pages than what you would predict otherwise.

Something strange happens when I try to create a counter-example.  If I look for the relationship between ‘George Bush’ and a randomly chosen number like ‘193443′, I get the following:

•  Probability of a page containing ‘193443 the’: 2.2e-9 (15k pages)
• Expected number of joint pages: 0.52
• Actual number of pages: 52 pages
• Ratio of likelyhood: 101 more than chance

Although it is counter intuitive, it turns out that there are relationships between ‘George Bush’ and this particular number, even though the average person might not expect it.

Consider the following likelyhood ratios:

• cat-dog: 3561
• airplane-sasquatch: 10313
• copper-existentialism: 2898
• preponderance-evidence: 12887
• invisible-brick: 2360

What is going on here?  Clearly the likelyhood ratio is high for common phrases, but it is also high for things that seem rather unlikely such as ‘invisible brick’.  It’s actually really tough to come up with pages with low likelyhood ratios:

What is going on here?

The Machine That Ate the Planet 

I’ll be starting to work at Google next week and from what I can gather they are basically building a computer the size of a planet to store and process all human knowledge.  Actually with the addition of video to searches it might be closer to say that the computer will store all of human experience, but hey, one step at a time kids…

I’ve always been suprised that the best way Google can pay for it’s ginormous database is by selling ads.  There’s nothing wrong with ads, it’s just seems to me that there’s a progression from an index of keywords on web pages to a semantic representation of information.  If we could alter the representation of a page suitably, would we transition from a machine which is able to find pages to a machine which knows things about the world.

What is ‘Knowing’? 

Of course this raises all kinds of spooky questions about what it means to know things.  If I can type a question into google’s search bar and find a page that gives me the answer without too much trouble, then this might be as good operationally as a true AI.

For example, if I type the question ‘What is the diameter of the earth?’ I receive the following response as the first result:

What is the diameter of the earth?

The answer to the geography question - what is the diameter of the earth?

Could an AI do any better?

Still, it is tempting for me to believe that Google might be able to do better if it represented information with some kind of semantic network.  I.e. breaking pages down into paragraphs and sentences.  Semantic networks are sort of an old idea in AI, and are discredited now as far as I know.  But they make possible several interesting linguistic tricks like the generation of non-sense sentences.

Sentence #123901210312

We tend to represent our thoughts online in a written language like English.  The information density of English is pretty low - something like 1 bit per ASCII character.  So we know there is a lot of redundancy in english sentences.   But there is another kind of reduncancy.  The same thought can be repeated over and over.  For example, a search for the sentence:

“Albert Einstiein is a smart guy”

 produces two hits.   The sentence:

“George Bush is an asshole.”

produces 14,500 pages.  We might be able to draw inferences about beliefs based on how frequent certain sentences are used.

There are a couple of trillion web pages out there, say 10 to the 10th power.  If every web page could be analyzed into say, 100 sentences on average, that means that every sentence on the web could be given a number from 1e15.  That’s a measly 52 bit number to represent all the possible sentences on the internet.

 

Letters Make Words

You could also choose to build a semantic network around the notion of sentences in pages, or words in sentences.  To do some simple visualization experiments though it’s fun to ask google about simple character frequencies.

As of this morning, Google has about 8 trillion pages in the index that contain the word “a”.  You can actually do this query for all 26 single-letter “words” and you get a frequency diagram that looks like this.

 

 

 

The word “a” is the most common single letter word followed by “e” “i” “o” and curiously by “s”.

In true Martin Gardener fashion, you could do the same thing with two letters next and you get a little frequency chart like this:

 

The bright spots in the image correspond to words like “be”, “is”, “of”, etc, so this figure does say something about the english language.

 

Building a frequency table like this isn’t that enlightening and it gets progressively harder as the number of letters increase.  But it does provide some early clues about how we might build or visualize a semantic map.  Next time I’ll try to extend this idea with words.

 

Made it back this weekend from BFD, Live 105’s annual festival of alternative rock.  They had over twenty bands from local unknowns to national favorites.

My favorite of the day was Audrye Sessions, which also was the first band we saw.  The lead singer has a high melodic delivery with is very smooth and passionate at the same time.  With all the screamer bands out there that is kind of a unique quality.  Their songs are pretty good, but it was interesting that the rhythm section didn’t seem that strong and there were a couple places where things sort of fell flat for a few bars.  They didn’t have a fantastic stage show but they did give some thought to the way they were dressed - kind of like from an old western, but not in an obvious way.

Second up for me was Silversun Pickups.  I like several of their songs, which also seem to employ fairly simple rhythm section.  It was interesting that they chose to play a lot of the groove songs with a fast dance beat, which I didn’t really like, but might have been the right choice.  The drummer put on a good show and had a really unique drum setup.  All of them were having a good time and it seemed like they were amazed to be playing in front of such a big crowd.  Their stage show had some motion with the singer running around when he wasn’t on mic, but it was pretty subdued compared to Flyleaf.

On the main stage, Scissors for Lefty put on an elaborate stage show with dancers, costume changes, and singers in various stages of undress.  I wasn’t really taken in by any of the songs, but the show gave me something to watch instead of going to get a beer, and I’ll remember them because of it.

The rest of the bands started sounding all the same after a while.  It’s funny that we’ve talked so much about making our music more danceable, because it seemed like every other verse or chorus at BFD relied on the four-on-the-floor beat pattern, which is effective initially, but then begins to get a little tedious.  We’ll have to be careful with that one.

All of the bands suffered from sound issues - I cant think of a single performance that had better sound that what we typically have at a rehearsal or show, so it seems like we shouldn’t worry to much about the fact that things aren’t crystal clear.

All in all a good show.  There are some weak points in the ‘alternative’ genre that need to be addressed.

bands sounded the same

I was really excited to be able to go see Sick Puppies again at Slims on Friday night.  Their earlier show in May was one of the best I’ve seen - trio, good songs, good sound, and the band was crazy tight.  Okay - some of the lyrics need work, but hey it’s their first album.

When I checked the lineup though I was surprised to find out that they would be the opener.  When we arrived the place was totally packed with teenagers and I saw the guys from the band take the stage and start sound checking.  I could tell by the looks on their faces that there was trouble with the sound and they spent an extra ten minutes or so trying to fix things, but then they started their set.  Shim spent a lot more time trying to get the crowd going this time, which was funny because there were so many more people there.  He did the ‘when I say 1-2′ trick, and the trick of having each side of the room compete to see who is the loudest and really tried to get the crowd moving.

The sound on the first half of the set was crap - somewhere a drum mic was feeding back bass frequencies and ruining the songs.  It was worst on ‘All the Same’, which was probably the song that most people had paid to see.  Things got a little bit better after that, but the guitar sounded a little thin and the vibe was pretty bad after the feedback problems.

They were professionals though and worked through the problems.  In comparison to the last gig, the set was really short - only about seven songs:  Cancer, My World, Pitiful, Say My Name, All the Same, Howard’s Tale.  It’s good to know that even pros have sound issues and they just grit their teeth and get through the set.

 I talked very briefly to the guys in the band, but didn’t choose my moment very well.  I should have waited to talk to them when they were just chilling having a beer.  The autograph table was too crowded to really say much.

Next up was Kill Hannah, which is kind of a weird combination of Robert Smith from the Cure and the 80’s hair band Poison.  They came on stage at first with lights on their guitars, a smoke machine and lasers, which I though was pretty cool, but none of their songs hooked me and it sounded like the singer had fried his vocal chords completely.  Some of their songs were danceable, but only because they were basically dance music dressed up as emo.  I’m sure they put a lot of effort into their stage show and their look, but it didn’t really matter for me because the music wasn’t there, or maybe the image just turned me off.  They did have a fair amount of fans though, so I guess kids can relate to that kind of stuff.

Flyleaf came last, and they had the best set of the night.  The bass player didn’t do much flashy playing, but he had a 2′ tall platform on stage that he could stand on or jump off of which he did often and with great effect.  The whole act was very dramatic and had the feel of Cirque du Soleil.  The vocalist was very expressive and the songs were good.

Take away

Each of the bands had a different crowd and there was some overlap.  The age of these kids made me realize that these audiences probably don’t have a well formed sense of identity yet.  I guess I’ve overlooked one of the main things that bands provide is a way to brand ourselves and kids are especially into that.  No one listens to their parents music for long.

This raises several good questions:

Who do you want you fans to be?  17 year old kids?  Adults?

What kind of identity can you provide?  Is it the same as the ne you want to provide?

How much is the right effort to put into a stage show?  When do lasers help and when do they simply become distracting?

Right now I’m thinking that the Pebble Theory/Audrey Sessions approach is the one I like - good music without a lot of distraction.