The many moods of 'My favorite things'
Trying to decide whether two performances are similar or not can be very difficult, even if the two performances are of the same song. Doug Eck has put togther a page called My favorite things which demonstrates this wonderfully. Doug has collected performances of the Hammerstein melody by a number of artists (from Julie Andrews to Outkast) in snippets of mp3 files for easy comparision. On once axis (melody) the songs are extremely similar, but on others (instrumentation, rhythm, tempo, timbre, mood) they are very different.