Comments on: Uh oh. The celestial jukebox has arrived

By: The celestial jukebox has arrived (?) « Cohesion Arts

The celestial jukebox has arrived (?) « Cohesion Arts — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:39:43 +0000

[...] via musicmachinery.com [...]

By: firebomb

firebomb — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:09 +0000

good post congratulations

By: David Jennings

David Jennings — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:42:20 +0000

Yeah, you’re right, Daniel, the play button is just a ‘placebo’ user interface widget. It doesn’t really do anything, but in our market testing we found that the majority of users liked to have the feeling that they were actively ‘in control’ of the device, even if they weren’t. So we figured, give them a button to help exercise their thumbs; what harm can it do?

The prototype I’m using often plays me movements from John Cage’s 4’33″. I think it shuffles them in different order to keep me interested.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:24:27 +0000

About that picture, a machine that knows, which music I will like, will also know, if I want to listen to music … so there’s no play button necessary.

David, I think these machines will have a direct connection to our brain, gaining information about the music we would like to listen to. In the next step, these machines will not only access all music that has ever been created, they will be able to create exactly what we want to listen to, in a sense that they make us feel the way we want to feel. Hehe, and that’s the point where music will lose lots of its value … since these machines will also be able to create this feeling without the use of music.

By: Ally

Ally — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:04:49 +0000

Oh, OK, fair enough. That seems obvious now you mention it. I must’ve left my sense of humor at home yesterday :)

By: David Jennings

David Jennings — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:39:10 +0000

Ally, I’m sorry I didn’t make it sufficiently clear that my whole concept was a parody and a projection-towards-absurdity, intended to make almost exactly the same point as you are making.

By: Ally

Ally — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:12:54 +0000

“etc etc etc…Sure, let’s add geolocation in as well — why not?”

because people could be spending their time and money developing useful technologies instead of endlessly refining a machine which will a)never beat human intuition anyway and b)make no difference to anyone’s actual life ever?

This is the same kind of over-refinement of a perfectly good technology as cosmetics companies spending billions on incremental improvements to shampoos and moisteurizers, and Gillette fitting more and more blades onto razors, and so on and so on. My soccer shirt doesn’t need special EZ-breathe(tm) and ClimaLite(tm) fabric, it’s just a shirt, I’ll get by without it!

Please excuse the rant but as a music fan I don’t mind occasionally listening to music I don’t love. Sometimes I just like it, sometimes I don’t even like it. If all you eat is sweets, you’re eventually gonna feel sick.

By: David Jennings

David Jennings — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:29:42 +0000

Dan, and others, my idea — which I adapted from one that Paul himself originated in 2006 — was that this iPod would have a bluetooth connection to your shoes (a la Nike/iPod) so it would know if you were walking/running/driving/sitting etc. It would have some kind of galvanic skin response detector in the button, so it would know your mood. It would, of course, have access to your entire listening history, and recommendations from your friends/’neighbours’ (in the last.fm sense). Sure, let’s add geolocation in as well — why not? And it would have one cracking algorithm to take all these feeds and determine _exactly_ the _one_ song you’d love to hear next. Patent pending.

By: Dan Foley

Dan Foley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:35:53 +0000

Perhaps geolocation will soon become part of the mix then – if the song suggestion mechanism knows where you are, it can guess at what you might be doing, and this could inform the type of song you might like to hear…

By: Nick Francis

Nick Francis — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:22:20 +0000

You’re absolutely right. Filtering all this stuff in some relevant way to individual listeners will be the key. Once the music discovery process expands from artist/genre-based information, to include a context/listener-based process (age, taste, mood, time of day, etc), then there will be progress.

Still…no matter how many songs you have access to, you can only listen to one tune at a time.

So which one will it be? right here. right now.