Program developed to spot chart-toppers

A Spanish company has developed a program that can predict if a record is going to be a hit or not. As the British IT portal The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk reports, Barcelona-based Polyphonic HMI http://www.hitsongscience.com has used artificial intelligence technology originally developed for the banking and telecoms industries. It claims to have identified 20 elements of song construction - including melody, harmony, pitch, tempo, octave, beat, rhythm, fullness of sound, noise, brilliance and progression - which its "Hit Song Science" program matches against a database containing more than 30 years' worth of Billboard hit singles. The database, which currently contains more than 3.5 million songs, is updated weekly.