Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit, with its distinctive four chord riff, came out particularly high for the various features Dr Grierson identified.
Singer songwriter Ella Eyre was then asked to re-master the song to for a TV commercial launching the new model of the car.
“We found the most significant thing these songs have in common is that most of them use sound in a very varied, dynamic way when compared to other records,” Grierson explained. “This makes the sound of the record exciting, holding the listeners attention. By the same token, the sounds these songs use and the way they are combined is highly unique in each case.”
“Ultimately,” Grieson added, “there is no ‘formula’ for this, other than to make your song sound as different, diverse and exciting as possible.”
If you‘ve gotten a head-scratching (or completely obvious) recommendation from Amazon about what book you might like, based on something else you’ve ordered from them, and pined for the clerks at the bookstore that used to be in your neighborhood before Amazon put it out of business, you get a sense of how this kind of thing works: The study takes human judgment, tries to quantify it, and then declares it objective and universal.
