Sunday, February 24, 2013
Carnegie Mellon analysis shows online songwriters seek collaborators with complementary skills
Science Codex: A musical collaboration, be it Rodgers and Hammerstein or Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, requires a mix of shared and complementary traits that is not always obvious. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University discovered elements of this unique chemistry by using an automated technique to analyze an online songwriting community.
Based on four years of data collected though an international songwriting challenge called February Album Writing Month, or FAWM, the Carnegie Mellon team found that common interests or skills do not cause collaborators to seek each other out. The researchers found, for instance, that two people were actually less likely to collaborate if they liked the same songs. More likely would be a writer in one genre seeking out a collaboration with someone who works in a less familiar genre.
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2 comments:
I think this article goes very well with our last meta skills talking about collaboration and cooperation. I think this goes along with the idea that collaboration is many people submitting a myriad of ideas, however when we defined it in class we did not really say that it was going on with people who had different skill sets. Our class as a whole kind of defined it as a something that happens against our wills. I did not get a sense of positivity out of our conversation that people seek out collaboration or that they desire for it to be equal. I think that this article does a better job at explaining how wonderful collaboration can truly be in any field.
One of the most interesting statements in this article is that the researches found that people search for collaborators with different skills than their own, and that those partnerships turn out to be more fruitful. Potentially, part of what Nathan is commenting on is the fact that so many of us in the school of drama have some similar skill sets- not to say that we're all replicas of each other, but maybe we're not different enough to truly collaborate. This is especially true earlier in our careers and time at CMU, while we have not yet begun to specialize in an area and really become a good collaborator by focusing on just one element, and allowing those with different skills to work in another of the elements.
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