Boy oh boy, do you little nerdlings need to cheq this out: Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names. Explained thusly:

When working on the paper "The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity" (paper PDF link) we built MusicSeer to collect human evaluation of artist similarity. We expected a lot of responses but needed a way to ferret out "bad" results-- robots, users just clicking randomly, and people that didn't know the bands presented. One idea was to pepper the list with "red herrings" in the form of fake bandnames-- and if someone chose one, we'd ignore their responses later on.

Instead of thinking up a few, I made a quick script to part-of-speech tag the original list of 6,500 artist names that we were considering. This left us with a set of common band name grammars (popular ones were NNP NNP and NNP #.) We then fed terms from our already collected music text set ('Klepmit') through the grammars again (at the natural probabilities) to make some believable names.

If you start a band with one of these and get famous, I only ask that you don't use "Caldera Catnip," as it is already taken.

Try matching up some of 'em with styles. For instance:

"An Warrant" - Post-hair band
"Cocky Magpie" - Long Island bar band
"All Beehives Aviator" - GBV song title
"Goodby Celebration" - Emo band/song
"Nimble Crossroad Creamery" - E6 or Iron & Wine-ish folk band
"Automata Politics" - Hardcore band
"Abundantly Arsenic" - Mars Volta song title
"Placenta Boathouse" - Industrial band
"0694904732" - Post-punk band
"Bluefish Canister" - Jamband
"Transistor Playwrights" - Decembrists song title
"Gentile Blues" - Clem Snide song title
"Monks" - hee hee.

Actually, almost all of these could be either a Mars Volta or GBV song title, come to think of it. ("56265 Sculptors Beside" especially.) I almost want to name a band "Tourists" though.
posted by Mike B. at 10:55 AM 0 comments