(no subject)

[which_chick]

More stuff on the mix cd for my mom.



In the comments for last entry, I noted that I had located a widget to do what I wanted. It's here for the folks who don't read old comments. It's a Windows software, legitimately free, and runs quite nicely in Wine for those of us who do not have Windows.

According to the widget, we have the following beats per minute for the songs in the list. (It's using some sort of math-based sampling algorithm thing, probably on the front end of the song. It can be wrong. Sometimes it comes up "0" for songs that it cannot detect beats-per-minute with. It's not real good at opera, not real good at certain beat-heavy songs, not good at unaccompanied vocals. It also sucks at classical. It also might be thinking that there are more or fewer beats per minute -- off by a multiple -- but in that case it's robustly wrong, wrong the same amount and wrong the same way every time for that song, so a quick listen to the tune in question should twig the user to the problem.)

Here's what it gives me for the pre-existing track list.

157 Whip It
130 Video Killed Radio Star
121 Celebration
163 Let My Love Open the Door
178 Turning Japanese
108 I Want Candy
105 Come On Eileen (okay for speed)
101 Mickey
128 You Spin Me Round
217 Walking on Sunshine
176 Dancing With Myself
115 Centerfold
120 Girls Just Want to Have Fun
164 ? Our House ( way too slow)
143 Mr. Roboto
122 Let's Hear It For the Boys
172 Foot Loose ( not too bad, slow down perhaps?)
205 Walk Like an Egyptian ( slow down?)
156 La Bamba
137 867-5309

Couple of things -- whatever the hell it is measuring (and I reserve judgment that the thing-being-measured is tempo), it is consistent across different efforts. I have like six copies of Come On Eileen (It's a song that everybody has in .mp3 format. And my mp3 files are not particularly organized, though I am trying to do better on that front. I have overlap. Yes, it's sloppy. Disk space is cheap.) and all of them come up the same in the widget because I check stuff like that. Come On Eileen is *also* interesting because it has a steadily increasing tempo through the duration of the song, so I'd expect it to rank slow on the widget scale if the widget uses a relatively small sample of tune-age at the beginning of said tune to generate the bpm-osity. :)

I find it interesting that Our House comes up so high (165) on the widget when my mom thinks it's entirely too slow. What the hell is she walking to? If you put the left foot on the cymbal-ish thing, it's kind of peppy. It would be dog slow if you put one foot to each cymbal-ish thing, though.

Also, why, then, in my mom's rating, does Mickey *not* come up "way too slow"? At 101, it should be half again as slow as Our House but she doesn't say it's "way too slow". Something iss weird, here.

Either the widget is detecting something that isn't beats-per-minute or my mom is walking to something that isn't beats-per-minute. I think I need to do some experimenting with walking to said music and using a stopwatch and perhaps fucking well counting footsteps. Yes. But right now, I have to go. (Y'know, I'm probably overthinking this. It's a mix cd.)

Comments

[cassandramorgan.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's counting beats per minute but here's the breakdown as I see it:

Mickey - you can step every other syllable. oh-MICK-ey-YOU'RE-so-FINE

Our House (assuming this is the Crowded House song and not something obscure) - It's about every 4 syllables. our-HOUSE-in-the-middle-of-the-STREET

So it's less about the cymbals in the background and more about the lyrical breakdown.