Hi,

I am new here, I am looking for some advice.

I have a piece that I can play and I really like (in this case, it's the The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria, for Piano and flute, but that should not matter), and I am looking for pieces that are (subjectively) similar to this.

How does one searches for pieces that are similar to other pieces?
(Besides starting a thread here for every question, which does not seem to be that effective.)

Is there a site somewhere, which collects some "music similarity data" for music pieces, and can list similar pieces for a given piece?

Thank you for your help:

Kristof

Similar in difficulty, mood, compositional era, form, length, or...?

I doubt it. As per the above reply, there would be all kinds of ways of defining what kind of similarity you're talking about, plus other issues.

The main thing that strikes me about your question is that the notion seems to come from some different field, and I wonder if it does. I'm aware of various fields that do deal with things like that -- such as the disparate fields of weather forecasting and baseball analysis! -- but I've never come across anything like that in music. Do you have some background or experience with another such field?

I'm a big baseball fan and love looking at "similarity scores" between different players. One of the major baseball websites, baseball-reference.com, gives lists of "most similar" players for each player, based on crunching of their records. I think this would be much harder to do with music in any particular way that would satisfy many people. There are just too many variables, and I think they would be very hard or impossible to define effectively in a way that would lend itself to this kind of parsing.

A music score Pandora... That would be awesome!!

pianoloverus:

In this particular case
- Should be arranged for piano + flute
- Should have a similar mood. (Or the exact emotions could be different, but the level of passion should be at least the same.)
- In this given piece, I especially like how the various keys morph into each other, while the melody is moving along like nothing happened. (For example, how the beginning C-major is kind of "overthrown" by an F-major, and then G-major, and then the original C-major returns.)

Mark_C:

Yes, there are many variables, and many ways do define similarity; however, if people could leave textual descriptions (about why they consider two pieces similar), this could be covered. (But I understand why this is not easy, or common.)

* * *

About similar projects: what comes to my mind first is the anime recommendations database, and than there is TV Tropes.

* * *

So, of there is no such site, then should I just start asking around?

Thank you for your help:

Kristof

I'm sure there there are quite a few pieces but I don't know the flute repertoire at all. Here's the only one I know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kLy8qJFbM

Available here:

http://www.mikegarson.com/shop/index.php...o-digital.html#

Oh, that was absolutely lovely. Csillag, what I do is actually go to Sheet Music Plus and look around for the music. So you can search piano/flute -- then I would look at the music and if you found something seemed similar to the features you're looking for, then I would put it into YouTube and listen to the music to see if I actually liked it. The other thing that I really like about YouTube is that if you put in one thing, there are always the other "related" videos on the right column that can lead you to hear other pieces that you might like. Yes, you hear some really bad stuff, but it's research to find the gems. Good luck with your quest.

Probably the closest to what you are looking for (although not quite what you are looking for) is this. I don't think that what are you looking for exists, although it would be awesome.

Great get!


Yes. I think what you found might be as close as there is to what I thought he meant.


Csillag: I didn't realize you meant specifically flute + piano. In view of that, I think you're trying to be way too fine on the rest of it, regarding any formal search of that sort, since the combo in itself is a fairly limited repertoire. What SusanK said sounds like the best advice there could be:

SS:The Swan
http://imslp.org/wiki/Le_carnaval_des_animaux_(Saint-Sa%C3%ABns,_Camille)#For_Flute_and_Piano_.28Taffanel.29