The Spirit of Music: The Science of Pop

Since the early days of pop music, the music industry has been searching for the secret formula to writing a successful song -- for that special alchemy that separates a Grammy-winner from a dud. For a period in the 1970s and 80s, the self-styled King of Pop Michael Jackson seemed to have stumbled upon it, but somewhere along the line he, too, seems to have misplaced it.

Hit Song Science claims to be able to predict whether a song will be a pop hit

But now a piece of software claims it can compute whether a song has chart-topping potential, and a number of record companies and musicians are using Hit Song Science (HSS) to gauge whether they have a hit on their hands.

The software, developed by Barcelona-based Music Intelligence Solutions, works by breaking down more than 60 elements of a song, including melody, harmony, tempo, pitch, octave, beat, rhythm, fullness of sound, noise, brilliance and chord progression, and compares it against a database of over 3.5 million past commercial hits.

The program organizes songs into clusters with similar-sounding equivalents and then rates the song on a scale of one to ten, with a score of 7.3 being deemed likely to do well in the music charts.

Curiously, clusters of songs do not necessarily contain songs that sound the same to the human ear, but from a mathematical perspective they share similarities. HSS analyzed music from Norah Jones' first album before she broke through and the program's algorithms placed her in a cluster with Linkin Park, Aerosmith and JayZ.

If you have ever wondered why you sometimes find yourself humming along to some smooth jazz on the radio when you consider yourself a strict thrash metal fan only, then perhaps HSS has discovered the scientific answer.

Besides Norah Jones, the program also predicted success for Mika, while "Turn Your Car Around," a song penned by Ben Novak, a singer-songwriter from New Zealand, was rated as a potential hit by HSS, who recommended it to Sony Music in the UK. It eventually ended up as a vehicle for ex-Blue band member Lee Ryan and scored a respectable UK chart position of 16 in 2005.