10,000 band-names:
When working on the paper "The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity" (preprint link on adam's site) 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.
Petty Education
Congress Freckle
Franchise
Breathe Faun
Manly Pandas
Monsoon
Some Herd Trouble
Seagull Sensor Drive
Narcissus
Binaural Dropout
Chuck Tore
Bran
Minimax Bay Ewe
Minimax Skunks
He didn't include my favorite fake band-name, though: "The Honey-Roasted Landlords."
(via Oblomovka)
