Intro Part Four: Song Rating Demonstration

Scoring blink-182's "Going Away to College", second by second

Part of an ongoing introduction series to the project. If you haven't already, start with the very first post for a project overview before continuing to this one.

Now that we know the formula, method, and criteria for rating a song, let’s see what this looks like in practice.

Listening through blink-182’s “Going Away to College” from the classic Enema of the State, and then reading through the lyrics, follow along with the breakdown below to see exactly how the song’s points were awarded and its rating calculated.

Remember, a musical point for a particular criterion can only be awarded one time per section. So, even if a verse has five instances of vocal harmony, only one point maximum can be given until the song moves on to the next section, where “eligibility” for that criterion then resets.

Music Listenthrough (21 points)

Introduction (0:00-0:18)

• Just strummed chords, no points.

Verse 1 (0:19-0:46)

1. (starting at) 0:19: Picked, major key lead guitar

2. 0:21: wandering (enough) bass part

3. 0:28: drum fill to new section of the song

4. 0:30: audible, “exposed” bass line

5. 0:37: vocal harmony

Verse 2 (0:47-1:13)

6. 0:46: Picked, major key lead guitar

7. 0:47: wandering (enough) bass part

8. 0:57: exposed bass line

9. 1:04: vocal harmony

10. 1:13: drum fill to new section of the song

Chorus (1:14-1:32)

11. 1:16: vocal harmony

Verse 3 (1:33-1:58)

12. 1:32: picked, major key lead guitar part

13. 1:33: wandering (enough) bass part

14. 1:41: exposed bass line

15. 1:41: picked, major key lead guitar part (different than the one at 1:32)

16. 1:51: vocal harmony

17. 1:59: drum fill to new section of the song

Chorus (1:59-2:18)

18. 2:02: vocal harmony

Instrumental Break (2:19-2:36)

19. 2:28: exposed bass line

20. 2:33: drum fill to new section of the song

Chorus (2:37-2:58)

21. 2:40: vocal harmony

There are a few spots where you could argue points should (Travis may be playing steady 1/4 notes on the ride cymbal in a couple of places) or shouldn’t (are the bass parts starting at 0:21, 0:47, 1:33 pronounced enough?) have been given. But overall this song is pretty straightforward and I think anyone measuring it against the specified critera would tally a similar number of points.

Lyric Readthrough (5 points)

Remember, in addition to hitting on the lyrical categories described in the last post in a creative (or at least not overly trite way), a lyric needs to pass the “Would someone have put it as their away message 20 years ago?” test.

For this song, I awarded a lyric point to each of these five lines or larger phrases:

1. Why does it feel the same to fall in love or break it off? — could put this under the Growing Up or Melodrama categories

2. If young love is just a game, then I must’ve missed the kickoff — Growing Up, Melodrama, Unrequited Love

3. Don't depend on me to ever follow through on / Anything, but I'd go through Hell for you — Self-Deprecation, Melodrama

4. I haven't been this scared in a long time / And I'm so unprepared, so here's your valentine / Bouquet of clumsy words, a simple melody / This world's an ugly place, but you're so beautiful to me — Growing Up, Melodrama

5. I'll think about the times she kissed me after class / She put up with my friends, I acted like an ass, I'd / Ditch my lecture to watch the girls play soccer / Is my picture still hanging in her locker? — Juvenilia, Unrequited Love

The individual lines in examples #4 and #5 here can’t quite stand on their own the way #1 and #2 do, but all together I think they do enough to check the box for at least one of the listed categories.

As said previously, scoring lyrics is a much more subjective process—for this song, I’d listen to arguments that #1 and #2 are co-dependent and should only count as one point, or that #3 and #4 aren’t anything remarkable. That said, I try not to ruminate too long over lyrics since they count significantly less toward a song’s rating.

Time Adjustments

• Short Song Tax: If you recall, I’ve built in some time adjustments to prevent the leaderboard from being dominated by short songs. The intention is to make a point worth the same in a short song versus a long one.

  • Songs between 2:30-3:00 have their rating deducted by 10%

  • Between 2:00-2:29: minus 15%

  • Between 1:00-1:59: minus 20%

  • Less than 1:00: minus 25%

Since this song clocks in at 2:58, a 10% penalty is applied to the final rating.

• Intro/Outro Adjustment: The song doesn’t have a long intro or outro where no instrument is being played (e.g., ambient space noises or a power chord that resonates for >10 seconds), therefore no adjustment is needed to the length of this song.

Final Score

Now, we can take the formula for POSI:

(Music clicks + Lyric clicks) ÷ total seconds in song = POSI

and plug in our numbers and time:

(21 + 5) ÷ 179 = 14.53

and then apply the 10% time penalty:

14.53 x .10 = 1.45

and subtract it from the raw POSI score (14.53 - 1.45) for an official rating of 13.08.

At the time of writing, that means the song has the 345th-highest rating out of the 2,735 I’ve listened to so far, well above the average score of 8.52. Not bad!

I am not a math-talented person, so thankfully the spreadsheet I use does all of this for me once I plug in the music points, lyric points, and song runtime.

Once I plug those in, I move on to the next song until the album is complete. Then, I average the POSI rating for each track to get the album’s own POSI score.

Rinse and repeat for 5000 songs, and that’s the project in a very large nutshell.

Next week we’ll look a little closer at a few of the other pieces of information I track for each song, album, and band.