Archive for June, 2010
Some preliminary Playlist Survey results
People expect human DJs to make better playlists:
The survey asks people to try to identify the origin of a playlist (human expert, algorithm or random) and also rate each playlist. We can look at the ratings people give to playlists based on what they think the playlist origin is to get an idea of people’s attitudes toward human vs. algorithm creation.
Predicted Origin Rating ---------------- ------ Human expert 3.4 Algorithm 2.7 Random 2.1
We see that people expect humans to create better playlists than algorithms and that algorithms should give better playlists than random numbers. Not a surprising result.
Human DJs don’t necessarily make better playlists:
Now lets look at how people rated playlists based on the actual origin of the playlists:
Actual Origin Rating ------------- ------ Human expert 2.5 Algorithm 2.7 Random 2.6
These results are rather surprising. Algorithmic playlists are rated highest, while human-expert-created playlists are rated lowest, even lower than those created by the random number generator. There are lots of caveats here, I haven’t done any significance tests yet to see if the differences here really matter, the survey size is still rather small, and the survey doesn’t present real-world playlist listening conditions, etc. Nevertheless, the results are intriguing.
I’d like to collect more survey data to flesh out these results. So if you haven’t already, please take the survey:
The Playlist Survey
Thanks!
The Playlist Survey
The tradition of the old-style Radio DJ continues on Internet Radio sites like Radio Paradise. RP founder/DJ Bill Goldsmith says of Radio Paradise: “Our specialty is taking a diverse assortment of songs and making them flow together in a way that makes sense harmonically, rhythmically, and lyrically — an art that, to us, is the very essence of radio.” Anyone who has listened to Radio Paradise will come to appreciate the immense value that a professionally curated playlist brings to the listening experience.
I wish I could put Bill Goldsmith in my iPod and have him craft personalized playlists for me - playlists that make sense harmonically, rhythmically and lyrically, and customized to my music taste, mood and context . That, of course, will never happen. Instead I’m going to rely on computer algorithms to generate my playlists. But how good are computer generated playlists? Can a computer really generate playlists as good as Bill Goldsmith, with his decades of knowledge about good music and his understanding of how to fit songs together?
To help answer this question, I’ve created a Playlist Survey – that will collect information about the quality of playlists generated by a human expert, a computer algorithm and a random number generator. The survey presents a set of playlists and the subject rates each playlist in terms of its quality and also tries to guess whether the playlist was created by a human expert, a computer algorithm or was generated at random.
Bill Goldsmith and Radio Paradise have graciously contributed 18 months of historical playlist data from Radio Paradise to serve as the expert playlist data. That’s nearly 50,000 playlists and a quarter million song plays spread over nearly 7,000 different tracks.
The Playlist Survey also servers as a Radio DJ Turing test. Can a computer algorithm (or a random number generator for that matter) create playlists that people will think are created by a living and breathing music expert? What will it mean, for instance, if we learn that people really can’t tell the difference between expert playlists and shuffle play?
Ben Fields and I will offer the results of this Playlist when we present Finding a path through the Jukebox – The Playlist Tutorial – at ISMIR 2010 in Utrecth in August. I’ll also follow up with detailed posts about the results here in this blog after the conference. I invite all of my readers to spend 10 to 15 minutes to take The Playlist Survey. Your efforts will help researchers better understand what makes a good playlist.
Take the Playlist Survey
MeToo – a scrobbler for the room
Posted by Paul in code, fun, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on June 11, 2010
This morning while listening to that nifty Emeralds album, I decided that I’d deal with those scrobble gaps once and for all. So I wrote a little python script called MeToo that keeps my scrobbles up to date. It’s really quite simple. Whenever I’m in the office, I fire up MeToo. MeToo watches the most recent tracks played on The Echo Nest account and whenever a new track is played, it scrobbles it to my personal account. In effect, my scrobbles will track the office scrobbles. When I’m not listening I just close my laptop and the scrobbling stops.
The script itself is pretty simple – I used pylast to do interfacing to Last.fm – the bulk of the logic is less than 20 lines of code. I start the script like so:
% python metoo.py TheEchoNest lamere
when I do that, MeToo will continuously monitor most recently played tracks on TheEchoNest and scrobble the plays on my account. When I close my laptop, the script is naturally suspended – so even though music may continue to play in the office, my laptop won’t scrobble it.
My scrobbles and Echo Nest scrobbles
I suspect that this use case is relatively rare, and so there’s probably not a big demand for something like MeToo, but if you are interested in it, leave a comment. If I see some interest, I’ll toss it up on google code so anyone can use it.
It feels great to be scrobbling again!
We swing both ways
Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions about Tristan’s Swinger is whether it can be used to ‘Un-swing’ a song. Can you take a song that already swings and straighten it out? Indeed, the answer is yes – we can swing both ways - but it is harder to unswing than it is to swing. Ammon on Happy Blog, the Happy Blog has given de-swinging a go with some success with his de-swinging of Revolution #1. Read his post and have a listen at Taking the swing out of songs. I can’t wait for the day when we can turn on the TV to watch and listen to MTV-Unswung.
Frasier does Nine Inch Nails
Posted by Paul in code, fun, remix, The Echo Nest on June 5, 2010
Oh My – Musician Josh Millard has recreated The Downward Spiral using nothing but audio from the NBC sitcom Frasier. So wrong, and yet, so right. Josh has the whole remixed album plus a video on his blog:
Is Music Recommendation Broken? How can we fix it?
Posted by Paul in events, Music, recommendation, research on June 1, 2010
Save the date: 26th September 2010 for The Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery being held in conjunction with ACM RecSys in Barcelona, Spain. At this workshop, community members from the Recommender System, Music Information Retrieval, User Modeling, Music Cognition, and Music Psychology can meet, exchange ideas and collaborate.
Topics of interest
Topics of interest for Womrad 2010 include:
- Music recommendation algorithms
- Theoretical aspects of music recommender systems
- User modeling in music recommender systems
- Similarity Measures, and how to combine them
- Novel paradigms of music recommender systems
- Social tagging in music recommendation and discovery
- Social networks in music recommender systems
- Novelty, familiarity and serendipity in music recommendation and discovery
- Exploration and discovery in large music collections
- Evaluation of music recommender systems
- Evaluation of different sources of data/APIs for music recommendation and exploration
- Context-aware, mobile, and geolocation in music recommendation and discovery
- Case studies of music recommender system implementations
- User studies
- Innovative music recommendation applications
- Interfaces for music recommendation and discovery systems
- Scalability issues and solutions
- Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and Open Web Services for music recommendation and discovery
More info: Wormrad 2010 Call for papers
