One of my favorite music-themed com­e­dy sketch­es of recent years fea­tures a sup­port group of Radio­head fans flum­moxed and dis­ap­point­ed by the band’s post-Ok Com­put­er out­put. The sce­nario trades on the per­plex­i­ty that met Radio­head­’s abrupt change of musi­cal direc­tion with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Kid A as well as on the fact that Radio­head fans tend toward, well… if not PTSD or severe mood dis­or­ders, at least a height­ened propen­si­ty for gen­er­al­ized depres­sion.

“Much of Radiohead’s music is unde­ni­ably sad,” writes Ana­lyt­ics Spe­cial­ist and Radio­head fan Char­lie Thomp­son. Rather than play some­thing “less depress­ing,” how­ev­er, as many an acquain­tance has asked him over the years, Thomp­son decid­ed “to quan­ti­fy that sad­ness, con­clud­ing in a data-dri­ven deter­mi­na­tion of their most depress­ing song.”

Now, pure­ly sub­jec­tive­ly, I’d place “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” in the top spot, fol­lowed close­ly by Amne­sia’s “Pyra­mid Song.” But my own asso­ci­a­tions with these songs are per­son­al and per­haps some­what arbi­trary. I might make a case for them based on lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tions, musi­cal arrange­ment, and instru­men­ta­tion. But the argu­ment would still large­ly depend on mat­ters of taste and accul­tur­a­tion.

Thomp­son, on the oth­er hand, believes in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment.” To that end, he cre­at­ed a “gloom index,” which he used to mea­sure each song in the band’s cat­a­log. Rather than lis­ten­ing to them all, one after anoth­er, he relied on data from two online ser­vices, first pulling “detailed audio sta­tis­tics” from Spotify’s Web API. One met­ric in par­tic­u­lar, called “valence,” mea­sures a song’s “pos­i­tiv­i­ty.” These scores pro­vide an index “of how sad a song sounds from a musi­cal per­spec­tive.” (It’s not entire­ly clear what the cri­te­ria are for these scores).

Next, Thomp­son used the Genius Lyrics API to exam­ine “lyri­cal den­si­ty,” specif­i­cal­ly the con­cen­tra­tion of “sad words” in any giv­en song. To com­bine these two mea­sures, he leaned on an analy­sis by a fel­low data sci­en­tist and blog­ger, Myles Har­ri­son. You can see his result­ing for­mu­la for the “Gloom Index” above, and if you under­stand the pro­gram­ing lan­guage R, you can see exam­ples of his analy­sis at his blog, RChar­lie. (Read a less data-laden sum­ma­ry of Thompson’s study at the ana­lyt­ics blog Rev­o­lu­tions.) Thomp­son also plot­ted sad­ness by album, in the inter­ac­tive graph fur­ther up.

So, which song rat­ed high­est on the “Gloom Scale”? Well, it’s “True Love Waits” from their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool (hear a live acoustic ver­sion up above.). It’s a damned sad song, I’ll grant, as are the nine run­ners-up, all of which you can hear in the YouTube and Spo­ti­fy playlists above). “Pyra­mid Song” appears at num­ber 5, but “How to Dis­ap­pear Com­plete­ly” doesn’t even rank in the top ten. From a pure­ly sub­jec­tive stand­point, this makes me sus­pi­cious of the whole oper­a­tion. But you tell us, read­ers, what do you think of Thomp­son’s exper­i­ment in “quan­ti­fy­ing sen­ti­ment” in music?

Here’s the top 10:

1. True Love Waits
2. Give Up The Ghost
3. Motion Pic­ture Sound­track
4. Let Down
5. Pyra­mid Song
6. Exit Music (For a Film)
7. Dol­lars & Cents
8. High And Dry
9. Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier …
10. Video­tape

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiohead’s “Creep” Played on the Gayageum, a Kore­an Instru­ment Dat­ing Back to the 6th Cen­tu­ry

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

A Free Course on Machine Learn­ing & Data Sci­ence from Cal­tech

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The influ­ence of mod­ern jazz on clas­sic rock extends far beyond too-cool pos­es and too many drugs. In the 1960s, writes Jeff Fitzger­ald at All About Jazz, “a few play­ers were ven­tur­ing beyond the sacred three-chord trin­i­ty and devel­op­ing some seri­ous chops.” John Coltrane’s “extend­ed impro­vi­sa­tions on his unlike­ly top-forty hit ver­sion of ‘My Favorite Things’” gets cred­it for inspir­ing “not only long-form rock hits like The Doors’ sev­en-minute ‘Light My Fire’ and CCR’s eleven-minute “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ but lat­er jam bands from the Grate­ful Dead to Phish.” But of course, the “break­through moment for Rock-Jazz rela­tions” arrived when Miles Davis “devel­oped a Jazz/Rock hybrid called Fusion.”

Davis’ Bitch­es Brew had much crossover appeal, espe­cial­ly to one of those afore­men­tioned jam bands, the Dead, who—a month after the album’s release—invited Davis and his elec­tric band to open for them at the Fill­more West. (Read about, and lis­ten to, that unique event here.)

The pair­ing made sense not only because Davis’ long-form grooves hit many of the same psy­che­del­ic musi­cal recep­tors as the Dead’s extend­ed free-form ses­sions, but also because Jer­ry Gar­cia was some­thing of a jazz-head. Espe­cial­ly when it came to free jazz pio­neer and inven­tor of “Har­molod­ics,” Ornette Cole­man.

“The gui­tarist had been a long time devo­tee” of Cole­man, writes Ben Djarum at Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock, and con­tributed his dis­tinc­tive play­ing to three tracks on Coleman’s 1988 album Vir­gin Beau­ty (hear them togeth­er on “Desert Play­ers” above). Garcia’s devo­tion marks him as a true rock con­nois­seur of avant-garde jazz. (Per­haps the only oth­er Cole­man fans in the rock world as indebt­ed to his influ­ence are the also-leg­en­dar­i­ly-drug-fueled indie exper­i­men­tal­ists Roy­al Trux.) It turns out the appre­ci­a­tion was mutu­al. “Cole­man him­self was aware of musi­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Dead and his own group, Prime Time,” which also had two drum­mers.

“Each empha­sizes both melody and look-Ma-no-lim­its impro­vi­sa­tion,” wrote David Fricke in a 1989 Rolling Stone arti­cle about “jazz’s eter­nal icon­o­clast find­ing a new audi­ence” through his asso­ci­a­tion with Gar­cia and com­pa­ny.  Upon wit­ness­ing the Dead play Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1987, and awed by the fans’ ulti­mate ded­i­ca­tion, Cole­man found him­self think­ing, “’Well, we could be friends here.’ Because if these peo­ple here could be into this, they could dig what we’re doing.” It would take six more years, but Cole­man final­ly played with the Dead in 1993 at their annu­al Mar­di Gras cel­e­bra­tion at the Oak­land Col­i­se­um. Where the Davis/Dead match-up 26 years ear­li­er had been a dip­tych, show­cas­ing the strengths of each artist by con­trast with the oth­er, the Coleman/Dead pair­ing was a true col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Not only did Coleman’s Prime Time open the show, but the sax­o­phon­ist joined the Dead onstage dur­ing their sec­ond set—in the midst of an open jam called “Space” (see in playlist below). His horn became a promi­nent­ly inte­grat­ed fea­ture of what one fan remem­bered as “sin­gu­lar­ly the most intense thing I ever wit­nessed.” Such exag­ger­a­tion from Dead­heads seems rou­tine, and sad­ly we have no video, nor could it ever repli­cate the expe­ri­ence. But some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar live record­ings of the entire Dead set may bear out the extreme­ly high praise. “The Oth­er One,” at the top of the post, first stretch­es out into very Cole­man-like ter­ri­to­ry, and the band keeps up beau­ti­ful­ly. After the verse kicks in halfway through, the song soon erupts into “walls of sound, screams, melt­downs, explo­sions….”

“The Oth­er One,” was “a wise choice,” writes Oliv­er Trager in his The Amer­i­can Book of the Dead, “as its rhythm-based pow­er allowed Cole­man to con­tin­ue his broad brush strokes.” After a “lan­guorous” ren­di­tion of “Stel­la Blue,” the penul­ti­mate tune, “Turn on Your Love Light,” above, “pro­vid­ed Cole­man with the per­fect show-end­ing rave­up to let loose in the fash­ion of an old­time, down-home Texas horn honker.” In an inter­view lat­er that same year, Gar­cia called Cole­man “a won­der­ful mod­el for a guy who’s done what we did, in the sense of cre­at­ing his own real­i­ty of what music is and how you sur­vive with­in it. He’s a high-integri­ty kind of per­son and just a won­der­ful man.” As for the night itself, Gar­cia remarked:

It was such a hoot to hear him play total­ly Ornette and total­ly Grate­ful Dead with­out com­pro­mis­ing either one of them. Pret­ty incred­i­ble. Good musi­cians don’t do that kind of char­ac­ter­iz­ing music. like this is this kind of music and that is that kind of thing.

Cole­man should be remem­bered as one of the most refined exam­ples of such a musi­cian for his cham­pi­oning what he called “Har­molod­ic Democ­ra­cy.” You can hear the full Grate­ful Dead set from that Feb­ru­ary, 1993 Mar­di Gras con­cert at Archive.org. The night went so well, notes Trager, that “the musi­cians repeat­ed the for­mu­la with sim­i­lar results in Decem­ber 1993 run­ning through a near­ly iden­ti­cal song list at the Sports Are­na in Los Ange­les.” One can only imag­ine the  audi­ence was equal­ly mes­mer­ized.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Jer­ry Gar­cia Talks About the Birth of the Grate­ful Dead & Play­ing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Ani­mat­ed Video

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness