101 stairways to heaven
Cover songs have an interesting place in the world of Music Information Retrieval. A good cover song is very similar to the original in one axis, but usually very different on another axis. As such they provide excellent examples of the difficulties inherent in music similarity. A cover is clearly similar to the original (its ths same song!), but is still very different (think about Devo's cover of the Rolling Stones (I can't get no) Satisfaction).
MIR researcher Doug Eck put together an excellent demonstration: The Many Moods of My Favorite Things. that collects a number of different versions of the Sound of Music classic.
Affirming the importance of covers in MIR, this year's MIREX (Music Information Evaluation eXchange) (the TREC of MIR) is considering offering a 'cover song contest', where the goal is, given a seed song, find the cover song among hundreds of other songs. It's an interesting problem ... I'm not sure how the traditional machine learning techniques will apply to this task.
I saw on digg.com that WMFU has put together a list of 101 covers of the venerable stadium classic: Stairway to Heaven. There's version by Dolly Parton, Frank Zappa, Dread Zeppelin, the London Symphony and Mary Schneider, Yodeling Queen of Australia, as well as the infamous Gilligan's Island version. The version by the Hard-ons will make anyone who has ever worked in a music store wince from the memory of every 15-year-old trying out a guitar.
Posted by Jeremy P on June 12, 2006 at 12:54 PM EDT #
A few years back, ABC in Australia had a show called "The Money or the Gun", which was a talk show hosted by Andrew Denton. One of the standout points of the show is that each week he had someone perform a different version of Stairway.
The standouts for me were Rolf Harris one week and The Royal Australian Opera on another. There were some other very good ones in there too and I ended up buying the video they released called "Stairways to Heaven".
Alan.
Posted by Alan Hargreaves on June 13, 2006 at 02:29 PM EDT #