Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
I was talking to Tristan about Bill Gates house where the rooms adjust the type of music to your personal taste, based on a wireless transmitter. Tristan said that his phone could do the same, and related it to the uselessness of Kevin Warwick's research. However, wouldn't it be great if your computer could automatically play music according to your mood? There could be various ways of recognizing moods, cameras, sensors, etc...
Even more importantly, there needs to be a way to automatically categorize and understand music. Right now I have many playlists like Relaxing, Study Music and Fast and Uplifting. I manually have to add songs to them, and smart playlists don't work for it, because it's hard to categorize music into different moods manually, especially with the growing size of people's music collection. This is going to be a big innovation area in the future.
Actually the categorizing of music has been a fairly big area of research for a while now; largely through the use of learning algorithms (data from current music of course) computers can classify the "mood" of music due to explicit and subliminal factors. This research wasn't done for your playlist, though - it's so the recording industry can identify potential hits, and proceed to market them and make lots and lots of money.
Posted by Travis on December 9, 2003 11:42 PMI think thats bullshit, and not something technology is going to be do until computers develop a creative consciousness (spelling? it's late and you did better on the SATs than me any way you goddamn Austrian!).
1. Mood is extremely complicated, and even when you thnk you know what your mood is you could be wrong. For example, I've had experiences where I've been like "oh man, I could totally use some high-flying piano jazz right now" but no such song seems to be right. And then, maybe a ethereal downtempo triphop track that happened to be on my playlist pops up and, contrary to all sensible expectations, is absolutely perfect.
2. Categorizing music is absurd, and is also insulting to music as a medium. Music means different things to a lot of people, and especially as music becomes more complex and mixed (e.g. not what they generally play on the radio) there is no correct sensible characterization. Especially since, as I stated above, a song may work in unexpectedly in several different settings. Every setting is different, every momeny is original, so the FUCK if I'm going to let some statistical A* tree searching algorithm pick me a song.
3. It's not healthy to become a passive music listener. Part of the art process is engaging in the choice of what you listen to. Thinking about what you really want to listen to is a subtle, useful tool of self-analysis and understanding. And choosing what to listen to asserts your role as a living, breathing, creative, free-thinking human being, and I have always found that very self-affirming.
Also I'm a crazy purist about these things, but I don't think this is a worthwhile investment of time. Technology can do a lot of cool stuff, but not everything.
Don't let the music industry thugs destroy the art - in the end music is beyond categorization.
Posted by Doug on December 10, 2003 01:33 AM