http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/24/help-scientists-build-better-playlists/ a blog about music technology by Paul Lamere Thu, 09 May 2013 02:20:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/24/help-scientists-build-better-playlists/#comment-1237 Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:05:38 +0000 http://musicmachinery.com/?p=608#comment-1237 [...] Help build better music recommenders by rating playlists! Luke Barrington, a researcher at UCSD, is soliciting the help of people like you to evaluate playlists generating by a variety of means (like artist similarity vs tag similarity). You’re presented with a ’seed song’ and two short playlists which  you can listen to, and then you can decide which one fits the initial song better. It’s fun and you get help scientists out. Take the survey here. [via Music Machinery] [...]

]]> http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/24/help-scientists-build-better-playlists/#comment-1195 Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:33:00 +0000 http://musicmachinery.com/?p=608#comment-1195 I don’t have time for creating a login and taking the survey at that site right now (or maybe ever), but after reading this blog for a while as a way of understanding what seems to me to be a very broken attitude towards what music really is, I feel like I should leave a quick comment about something that just occurred to me as I read this post and once again saw images of “music” increasingly coming to mean “a steady dripline of passively consumed opiate, defined (and therefore, eventually, virtually, created) by lifeless machinery – what I mean is that eventually the machine-readable aspects of musical expression will become the only ones given any thought in the process of production (the word “creation” doesn’t really apply here) and all others will atrophy, maybe taking any human joy they contributed to in their subtle way with them. So, obviously, I’m interested in this subject, but not in an uncritically enthusiastic way. That said, if there’s going to be machine recommendation, would it be too much to ask for there to be an aspect to it that allows for more breadth and variety, rather then just “feed me more of the same”? My immediate thought is that perhaps more emphasis could be placed on what products listeners considered to be so outside of their sphere of interest as to not even be considered “music” by them, and to what degree, and work from there, at least partially. Granted, an approach incorporating this aspect would require more active input from listeners (not suitable for braindead “people who bought x also bought y” type implementations at points of sale, probably) but it would allow for some vastly richer stretches for those who want their exposure to *music* to broaden, not just replacing a worn-out product with a shiny new version of the same thing under a different name. I realize none of this will be interesting to anyone who’s already lost the ability to distinguish between the concept of “music” and the concept of “efficiently supplied consumer product”, but just in case any other kinds of folks are reading this, I thought I’d respectufully toss it out there, with apologies for soapboxing in a manner that may not be quite in line with the main focus of this blog (sincerely). Just food for thought.

]]> http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/24/help-scientists-build-better-playlists/#comment-1194 Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:40:45 +0000 http://musicmachinery.com/?p=608#comment-1194 [...] build better playlists: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/24/help-scientists-build-better-playlists/ #tech [...]

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