Candy Every Critic Wants

Slashdot brought my attention to pitchformula.com. If you missed it, University of Chicago student Loren Jan Wilson indexes archives of music criticism from Pitchfork.com in an effort to write (program?) music that appeals to critics in terms of lyrical content, songwriting, and arranging. He's written several Perl scripts to help him do it. And he's posted the completed versions of the songs as well. The compositions aren't really up my alley, but hey, I'm no music critic, either.

When writing songs, Adam and I would struggle over how much the process could (and even whether it should) be fit to some sort of formula beyond the basics of song structure. We were mostly concerned with making songs symmetrical, like repeating interval patterns in different keys or in different parts of a song.

It was fun to play around with that while trying not to turn songwriting into a chore. I think it made us better songwriters, too. You can probably take this sort of effort too far, but it sounds like this guy had a lot of fun, got himself a nice formula for songwriting which probably helps inspire him, and managed to earn some academic credit for it all. Hats off.