12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2011) USING NETWORK SCIENCES TO RANK MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS IN BRAZILIAN POPULAR MUSIC Charith Gunaratna Evan Stoner Ronaldo Menezes Computer Sciences Computer Sciences Computer Sciences Florida Tech, USA Florida Tech. USA Florida Tech, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT sales, and playtime on the radio. However, this paper pro- poses to use techniques from networks sciences to model Music fascinates and touches most people. This fascina- the network of collaborations among musicians and derive tion leads to opinions about the music pieces that reflects from the social network a good ranking of musicians and people’s exposure and personal experience. This inherent composers in Brazilian music. bias of people towards music indicates that personal opin- Many Brazilian musicians are well-known to people in ion is inappropriate for defining the quality of music and Brazil and respected for their body of work. In Brazilian musicians. This paper takes a holistic view of the prob- popular music (Musica´ Popular Brasileira in Portuguese) lem and delves into the understanding of the structure of [11], hereafter referred to as MPB, names such as Tom Jo- Brazilian music rooted in Network Sciences. In this paper bim, Chico Buarque, and Noel Rosa are likely to be fa- we work with a large database of albums of Brazilian music vorites. But does the social network of collaborations in and study the structure of collaborations between all the mu- Brazilian support the view of critics about musicians such sicians and composers.