Are You Ever Happy With Your Chart? - Music

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

YoungPunk wrote:

Yeah you need to get Carly Rae Jepsen out of there...

Now now. What'd I say about subjective? hehe.

Also, I've heard a lot of people rave about it. Totally respectable.

YoungPunk

Yeah, its subjective, but I think its super cheesy and boring. Doesn't really stand up to the type of music they're copying, which is standard.

Also, I decided computers are incapable of making music.

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

YoungPunk wrote:

Yeah, its subjective, but I think its super cheesy and boring. Doesn't really stand up to the style of music they're copying, which is standard.

Also, I decided computers can't make music.

Cheesy? Arguably, but if there is any cheese it's part of the charm. Boring? That criticism doesn't make sense at all to me. Are we listening to the same record??

I'd argue the album actually does 80s pop better than the originals.

And as for your last sentence, I couldn't disagree more.

But yeah, I love Carly Rae Jepsen and no matter how I revise my system I can't see E·MO·TION moving out of the top 20. Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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YoungPunk

I'm not saying computers made Carly Rae Jepsen's music, I'm just going back on my crazy claims that computers can make music like Boarding House Reach or something I made on this board previously.

baystateoftheart
Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 29
Location: Massachusetts

sethmadsen wrote:

That sounds really interesting. I'd like to know more if you care to share, but if not, that's cool too.

In my current system, I rate every track from 0.5 to 5 on RYM. I weight the track rating average by the amount of time each song lasts. That weighted average is half of the score. Then I take the weighted track average of the highest rated 40 minutes of music (typical length for an album, which is of course tied to vinyl's capacity). That is the other half of the score. This second half of the formula makes it so that longer albums that have a lot of good music but uneven patches aren't punished.

I used to have a three-part score that also included an un-weighted track average, but ultimately found that to be an unnecessary feature that skewed the numbers.

Since adopting my current system, I've tried ditching one half of the formula or the other, or cutting it from 40 minutes to 30 minutes. I've also tried incorporating replay value as 25% of the formula and conceptual impressiveness/unity as another 25% of the formula. None of these ended up as a better approximation of my taste.

Now I'm thinking about taking the replay value and conceptual components and adding them as a small amount of extra credit, instead of as large chunks of the core formula. We'll see how that turns out.
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RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

baystateoftheart wrote:

sethmadsen wrote:

That sounds really interesting. I'd like to know more if you care to share, but if not, that's cool too.

In my current system, I rate every track from 0.5 to 5 on RYM. I weight the track rating average by the amount of time each song lasts. That weighted average is half of the score. Then I take the weighted track average of the highest rated 40 minutes of music (typical length for an album, which is of course tied to vinyl's capacity). That is the other half of the score. This second half of the formula makes it so that longer albums that have a lot of good music but uneven patches aren't punished.

I used to have a three-part score that also included an un-weighted track average, but ultimately found that to be an unnecessary feature that skewed the numbers.

Since adopting my current system, I've tried ditching one half of the formula or the other, or cutting it from 40 minutes to 30 minutes. I've also tried incorporating replay value as 25% of the formula and conceptual impressiveness/unity as another 25% of the formula. None of these ended up as a better approximation of my taste.

Now I'm thinking about taking the replay value and conceptual components and adding them as a small amount of extra credit, instead of as large chunks of the core formula. We'll see how that turns out.

Wow - that's really interesting, thanks for sharing.

I can't remember who suggested it... I think actually dihansse (sp, sorry?) suggested it to do the best 13 songs of a larger album... this really skewed things (kinda) for me because a lot of the records I like over 13 songs actually have 13 near perfect songs, so it made the rating of those albums I applied that to, maybe have too high a rating, but then sometimes not... so it was weird.

I'd be very interested on how this effects double albums and the like vs dihannsse's suggestion to see if I like the outcome better. Fantastic albums like The Wall, Exile on Main Street, the White Album, etc. somehow lose value, when I'd rank them much higher without a song for song comparison.

NoisyBeast
Lefty

Gender: Male
Location: Phoenix

baystateoftheart wrote:

I have hated my chart for years. I keep experimenting with different chart rules and scoring mechanisms, and throwing most of them in the trash

What is it exactly you don't like about your charts?? They're YOUR charts, so you should LOVE them!!! Throw out the "Rules"! Rate the albums you've heard, rank the way YOU prefer, and update the chart(s) as you find new albums which deserve top ranking. Have fun listening to great music, take notes & update accordingly!!
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Gender: Female
Age: 38

for me, the whole point of it is the dissatisfaction. having everything laid out is a great way to see your biases and the areas you want to push further on.

Kool Keith Sweat

I try to view my chart as a representation of where I'm coming from, where I am, and where I'm going with my listening. As a result of representing the current moment and future interests, you'll see new entries pop in frequently; they might stay for awhile, or they might leave shortly. The whole thing is more or less what I listen to most right now. I try not to place any restrictions on it past the prescribed limits of 100 entries and 20+ minutes per entry.

Rhyner
soft silly music is meaningful magical

Gender: Male
Age: 36
Location: Utah

In my experience, I've encountered three major hurdles in compiling favorites lists (of anything--albums, movies, books, TV shows, you name it).

1. I'm essentially ranking memories, and memories are flawed. Even if I'm working on only my top 100 albums, let's say, and I've narrowed it down to a specific 100, assuming each album is at least half an hour, that's a bare minimum of 50 hours of music (and likely far more than that). That means there are at least 49.5 hours of music listening experience separating the present moment, in which I'm making these ranking judgments, and the moment I last heard the least recently listened to album in my top 100. It's hard to make comparisons accurately with that kind of distance.

And the problem is much worse than that. Most of us have way more than 100 albums that we're trying to rank, and most of those albums are well over a half an hour. Additionally, we're not likely to have just listened to all of our top 100 in quick succession when we're putting together our top 100 lists, so the memories are even more distant most of the time.

This is the least of the three problems, because it has a pretty good solution--ratings! (Also, I've probably overstated the problem. We all know roughly how we feel about a given album once we're familiar enough with it.) When you listen to an album, give it a rating. When compiling lists later, refer to your ratings. Simple. The only time you'll run into the same problem is when you give multiple albums the same rating, but then you've at least reduced the number of albums to listen to because you only need to worry about comparing albums of the same rating.

Of course, rating albums comes with its own problems, which leads me to...

2. Albums are hard to compare. Even when comparing just two albums, one against the other, and I'm very familiar with both, and both are fresh in my memory, it's often not obvious which one should be ranked higher. This is for a variety of reasons, but primarily because different albums do different, not obviously comparable, things for me. How do you compare this album here, which you associate with a specific time in your life and which has enormous nostalgic value for you but isn't the kind of thing you would be able to get into nowadays because your tastes have changed but you still love listening to it every now and then for the nostalgia rush, with that album there, which is something new you've fallen head over heels for but you're still in the honeymoon phase and you can't say how long your love for it is going to last but right now it feels like it will last forever? And that's just two. It gets harder when you throw others in the mix. Like what about this other album that's widely considered one of the greatest of all time and has been hugely influential in all subsequent music and you totally recognize its greatness I mean how can you deny it when every time you give it a spin you find the experience incredibly rewarding so you have no doubt it deserves its status as a stone cold classic? How do you compare music that makes you want to dance with music that makes you want to cry? And that's not even factoring in your mood, or how your taste changes over time, and so on.

At this point the meaningfulness of ratings seems to melt away. I'm convinced there isn't one single metric on which the overall value of a piece of art, such as an album, can be given a number rating. A rating is merely a facile approximation of the grand total value of a confluence of mostly unrelated factors. It's reducing art to a number, so it shouldn't be taken too seriously. Which means the lists that result shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's all just for fun. And for showing other people the things we like and roughly how much we like them. I think that becoming happy with one's chart is less about getting the right albums in the right order than it is a matter of changing one's attitude, and not worrying about it too much. You don't need to find the perfect scoring mechanism, rating formula, or judgment criteria. Just enjoy listening to music, and your chart will reflect it.

But that's only if you actually make a chart, which brings me to...

3. The actual step by step process of putting together a list of favorites is overwhelming. There are just so many albums out there! Even if you're having fun with it, and not worrying too much, the process still involves a lot of decisions and judgments. That becomes tiring after a while. No one can continuously make choice after choice, judgment after judgment, without hitting a wall at some point. And if you keep going once you're at that point, you're not going to feel confident in or happy with your list, carefree attitude or not.

I find the best solution is to treat my charts as a work in progress at all times. I know I'll never get them to a satisfying, once-and-for-all permanent state, so I don't worry about trying for that. I just tinker with them as I feel like it, when the mood strikes.

I still voted no, so maybe I'm a hypocrite.