Archive for March, 2009
10 things I learned at SXSW
- I need to get a black tee-shirt
Black tees and Macs
- If I don’t have enough content to fill my timeslot, start showing pictures of puppies.
and puppies...
- If I start losing my hair, the best thing to do is to shave it all off and try to look like Clay Shirkey
- To be taken seriously, I must have the latest revision of Apple hardware
apple stack
- Nuclear tacos can burn me a second time, 4 hours later.
Nuclear Tacos
- Amongst my SXSW peers, my attention span is actually way above average
Time to check twitter
- When I have a choice between form and content, always chose form.
no phone number, but it looks good
- I need to turn off the key click on my iPhone lest I disturb my neighbors.
'click,' 'click' 'click'
- No matter what my second-grade teacher taught me, proper and polite behavior during a talk is to be chatting a way to all of my neighbors (via twitter).
twitterholic
- Don’t try my DVI to VGA adapter for the first time 5 minutes before my talk (f*ck you apple!)
adapter fail
Being Clay Shirky
sxsw music discovery chaos?
Posted by Paul in Music, recommendation on March 18, 2009
The very last panel I attended at SXSW Interactive was a panel called “Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos?” This was a roundtable discussion as opposed to a more traditional panel where ‘experts’ do most of the talking. Elliot and Sandy Hurst of Supernova.com guided a conversation about the state of music discovery.
To tell the truth, I had low expectations for this panel. These things often devolve into (a) discussion about business models, (b) people pimping their new site, (c) some self-proclaimed expert dominating the discussion. But instead of a trainwreck, this panel turned into one my highlights of SXSW.
There was a wide range of people with a wide range of views that participated in the discussion. There were music fans (of course) that touted their favorite discovery mechanisms (friends, last.fm, hype machine). There were music critics who reminded us of the role of the expert in filtering music, but who also admitted that there’s just too much music for them to deal with, so they need their own filters. There were music programmers who talked about the different levels of listening adventurousness based on demographics (us old people apparently are less adventurous). And there was the gadfly in the back of the room, who wondered why we cared so much about this – he had no problems finding music – and if people want to listen to American Idol, so what?
Early on in the discussion Elliot took a poll of the room that seemed to indicate that for many the primary way people found music was through friends. After this poll he ask me “why, since it seemed that most people found new music through their friends do we need machines to help us find music?”. I got to paraphrase the line from Mike McGuire: “music recommendation is for people that don’t have friends”. That got a bit of a laugh.
Of course, for a discussion like this, there’s never an ultimate agreement on anything. But it was fantastic to listen to the debate – especially by so many really smart people who are very passionate about music. Awesome panel! Good job Elliot and Sandy.
Music Discovery Deathmatch at SXSW
Posted by Paul in Music, recommendation on March 16, 2009
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11:30 AM, Anthony Volodkin (creator of the Hype Machine) and I will go head-to-head for 60 minutes in front of a live (and probably hostile crowd) at SXSW for a panel called “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo” . Anthony and I disagree about many things related to music discovery and recommendation but we do agree on one thing. Current music recommendation is mostly crap. In this session, I’ll be talking about music discovery innovation coming from the researchers, while Anthony will be talking about the new ideas coming from those in the front-lines – the next generation music startups. We have two very different perspectives on the future of music discovery. This will be fun.
The Tagatune Dataset
Edith L.M. Law has just released the long-awaited Tagatune Dataset.
From the README:
The Tagatune dataset consist of 31383 music clips that are 29 seconds long, created from songs downloadable from Magnatune.com. The genres include classical, new age, electronica, rock, pop, world, jazz, blues, metal, punk etc. The dataset is optimized for training machine learning algorithms — i.e. it includes tags that are associated with more than fifty songs, and each song is associated with a tag only if that tag has been generated by more than two players independently.
The data is collected from a two-player online game called Tagatune, deployed on the GWAP.com game portal. In this game, two players are given either the same song or different songs, and are asked to enter descriptions appropriate for their given song. After reviewing each other’s descriptions, the players then guess whether they are given the same song or not.
This is great data, useful for all sorts of things, especially research around autotagging and query-by-description. It is quite complimentary to a dataset that we are about to release from the Echo Nest (stay tuned for that).
On the ferry
Posted by Paul in Uncategorized on March 14, 2009
I’m on the ferry between Vermont and upstate NY blogging with my iphone on my way to picking up my son from school for his spring break. I was able to use the 4 hour drive here to practice my sxsw talk: “help! My iPod thinks I’m emo”.
Here’s a shot out the window. There’s still ice on the lake. I suspect there will be less ice in Austin TX.
128kbs or 320 kbs …
… only your mp3 encoder knows for sure.
Take the test at mp3ornot.com to see if you can tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 128KBS and one encoded at 320kbs. I couldn’t tell the difference (but I was listening via my laptop speakers). I hope the author will post statistics on how many people could tell.
A little more music in Davis square today
I like to think of The Echo Nest as the musical center of Davis Square in Somerville. However, today I think the musical center of mass is shifting slightly north and west (by about 100 yards) – to accommodate the arrival of U2.
Here’s the map. Point C is the Echo Nest, and Point A is the Somerville theater where the U2 concert will be held.
Here’s a photo from about 10:30 AM this morning … the satellite trucks are already in place:
The ultimate Spotify blog
If you use Spotify, you should check out The Pansentient League, where blogger Jer White blogs about all things spotify. For instance, Jer recently compared 10 different Spotify playlist sites listing their pluses and minuses. He’s also maintaing a complete list of Spotify Resources. Pansentient is a pretty handy site.
More on click tracks …
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on March 9, 2009
I’ve just been astounded by the number of and quality of the comments that I’ve received on my recent ‘searching for click track’ posts. I’ve learned a lot about modern music production, drumming, the power of Waxy, Slashdot, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Metafilter and BoingBoing and a bit more about python. I was surprised and heartened by the fact that even those who thought I was wrong, or thought that my analysis was off beat (snicker), offered their criticism in a very civil fashion – is this really the Internet?
Many have suggested other drummers to analyze and I’ve taken a quick look at some but I haven’t had time to do anything (I’ve got this SXSW talk to prepare, plus my regular job to do as well, sigh). Luckily enough, some others have already started to do some analyses. I shall try to post the analysis that people add to the comments or send to me here, so we can build a nice directory of click plots for various drummers.
Rush – The Enemy Within
Plot by Arren Lex
It looks to me like Neil Pert is using a click track on this song.
Rush - The Enemy within
Elton John – A word in spanish
Plot by Arren Lex
Looks like a click track
Elton John - A Word In Spanish
AC / DC – Highway to hell
Plot by Arren Lex
Looks like no click track for Phil Rudd.
Music Machinery 