The long tail of reggae riddims
Boston College research student Pacey Foster has (in collaboration with fellows Stephen Cook and Rich DeJordy) mapped the structural properties of how reggae riddims are networked together in different versions of songs (originally archived at reggae-riddims.com), and it all makes for some quite amazing insight.The world of reggae is often said to operate more like a creative commons than the corporate Western music industry, since artists freely compete with each other making different versions of the same songs, or riddims (rhythms). (Since as we all know, the Western ideal of copyright wouldn't allow for such free reproduction of rhythms and melodies...)
As with many other natural and cultural phenomena, the distribution of these reggae riddims display significant characteristics of a power-law distribution: a small number of riddims get versioned a lot and the vast majority (a long tail of different songs) get versioned only once or twice.
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other similar projects:
The word count flash site (shows how the dissemination of words in the English language displays similar properties).
The interactive sample application (shows how sampling creates interconnected links between works of music, displaying network properties).
posted by Jonas Andersson @ 11:56 am
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