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Computer DJ Uses Biofeedback to Mix
srand writes "So some scientists at HP developed this AI to mix new music tracks for dancers based on biofeedback from the clubbers.
The clubbers are each given a heart monitor, which sends information to the DJ through a wireless link. The DJ itself mixes music using genetic algorithms to find the tracks the audience likes best. The tracks are the "genes", and feedback from the audience determines the fitness levels of the genes." I still think generative music has a lot of potential, although I'd love an intermediate step where some sort of biofeedback picked MP3s based on your mood.
I wonder how it'll distinguish positive from negative reactions. Think of blown mixes, a jungle track sneaking into a trance set, etc., versus something really good brilliantly mixed, or (in a more mainstream club setting) a really popular track being played.
That works on two levels. Yes, you can pander, and a lot of top-40 clubs do that. But there is a sort of feedback loop between a DJ and the dance floor, and the DJ is constantly reading this to decide what track will work best next. Very few DJs can get away with "I'm going to play this and you're going to like it," but a DJ doesn't have to be a human jukebox either.
Exactly how advanced is this AI? I read the article a day or two ago and the thing failed to really go into many details, nor provide samples of what this AI can produce. Does the AI fall into "traps" where music becomes too repetitive? Or is it unable to progress from one sound to the next, creating unsettling shifts in music that a human will find distasteful?
Because it seems to me that making music is just a wee bit more involved than having a massive library of sound bites, picking one of them with a rand() function, tossing it into the loop, and waiting for people to react. I could see the AI painting itself into a corner if it only lets itself pick tunes that don't generate a negative value.
In other words, this AI is going to have to be able to compose interesting tunes or else all the flash and glory of reacting to humans is gonna be a flop.
If the AI has implemented some form of SOUNDEX for music files, then I could see it working. Like if the audience was really grooving to artist X, it could pick a similar song from artist Y, rather than just plugging in another song that artist X created and hoping people like it.
Not slamming the project too much though. It is quite cool and spawns all kinds of neat questions that would be a heap of fun to answer.
Wasn't there something like this in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"? There was a band whose music was changed by the way the audience felt at the time.
The reason a lot of people cram into warehouses thousands at a time is dance, listen, but also because the DJ too. Hmmm DJ "heartbeat" or Paul Okenfold. Also what the DJ mixes charges is damn near an art form, the really good ones can deliever quite an experience. We have seen purly computer generated/AI "art" before, imagine having to listen to it at 300Db. Plus I don't think a wireless HB moniter is going to match my leopard pattern leather pants and sparkly vest.
(no, I don't use drugs at raves)
"Get them before they get....
One thing I'm guessing this won't do is select new tracks and classify them - A large part of being a DJ is shoppping for new records and only picking the ones which will work. I'm guessing that without the audience research this system needs to be primed in advance.
Then there's teh showmanship part of DJ'ing, cutting up tracks live, giving the audience the rewind, scratching..... There will always be art in DJ'ing.
DJ S&M
When you go to a club, you don't want to just listen to music. You want to see the DJ. You want to hear HIS playlist. You want to discover his personal scratch combos. We all need some human presence, especially when it comes to party.
Would you enjoy to watch a soccer match, with only robots, executing programmed tasks? "I bet on this team, they probably used 23248234 as a salt for their number generator, it's better than 232488, that has a bug line 8723" . Would it be great?
You go to a party to be surprised, to discover something. The DJ changes the music according to dancers feeling, that's right. But dancers feeling also depends on the DJ's work.
Why is Carl Cox a great DJ? Because he does basic beat-matching? No. Carl Cox is fantastic because he plays with the dancers. He smiles, he jokes, he has a wonderful human communication, even without speaking. Why is Qbert a great DJ? Because when you see him, it's just as if he had 10 hands, or as if your eyes were too slow to follow the movements. Can you feel this with a stupid computer playing MP3s?
I work as a house and hip-hop DJ in Paris, France. People have fun listening to my music because I'm playing with kiddy songs, sometimes to "comment" what's happening on the dancefloor with funny sentences. I'm sometimes scratching on Dragonball Z over kicking funk house, just for fun. People don't expect that (so the HP computer won't do that), but they like it a lot. Once again, a stupid computer won't do this.
Computers are handy for a lot of stuff. But please, don't bring us a robot society. Keep some human feeling, or you will kill the fun.
{{.sig}}
Man, record companies aren't stupid. They're out to make as much money as possible. To do this, they need ot sell the greatest numbr of records as possible. To do this, they have to cater to the majority. Which is what they do. When are you people going to realize that statements like "we don't like plagerized cloned music" are blatently false, at leat when tlaking about the majority of the population. This type music IS what the majority like, thats why they make so much of it. If people didn't like this stuff, it wouldn't sell, and they'd stop making it. It's that simple.
And no, its not because "Well thats the only stuff they put out nowadays, so poeple have to like it". THats also totaly false. There is tons of music out here. Most people choose Pop music. It's that simple.
Man, I wish I had read all the way through the article before posting...*grin*
Pardon the vulgarity, but the part about leaving the club with the music you helped create sounds just too fucking sweet. I'd club every free weekend if that were an available service in my area.
My sigs always suck.
No. Just as the term "virtual reality" is applied to a lot more than just perfectly immersive, Matrix-like systems, "aritificial intelligence" has a much wider scope than just HAL-like systems capable of understanding human speech and providing coherent, intelligent replies.
One example of part of the AI field that isn't close to the movie-like image of AI is the expert system. At its simplest, it's a bunch of yes/no questions about a given topic. An answer to each question leads to either a new question or a conclusion. A classic application of this system is a guessing game that operates somewhat similar to 20 questions -- the user picks something and the expert system asks questions in an effort to guess what it is. If the system fails, it prompts the user for a new question to add to the tree that incorporates the new data item. All of this is trivial for anyone with even rudimentry programming experience to implement, it's not especially profound, and it'll never pass the Turing test, but it is a legitimate part of the AI field.
This dance system, as near as I can tell, seems to be way ahead of such a cut and dried expert system. It's using genetic algorithms to assemble music based on feedback from users. That sounds like AI any way you slice it. Sure the system isn't a conscious, self-aware entity, but that's just a small bit of the AI field (and most likely won't be realized for a long, long time).
The Grateful Dead used to do this song called "Space". Similar tunes were "Feedback" and "Drumz". Real freaky things with eletronic music. The Dead were also big into MIDI.
The last Dead show I saw, in 1995, right before Garcia died, I saw a computer monitor just off the stage, hooked up to all the midi shit and the soundboard. When the band played Space, it was like no other space that had ever been played -- I swear to christ it was fractal music. The music began to play itself, the band stopped playing and left the stage and it began playing NEW patterns, not just ordinary guitar feedback. It would have never stopped. In fact, it continued during the whole intermission, always generating new patterns. Finally they just killed the sound.
Ordinary fractal pictures take a complex valued function, and assign different colors to it based on its closeness to zero. What they had done was map the function onto different MIDI instruments and notes, sound instead of colors. Then they seeded it with their own playing, and took off.
It blew my fucking mind wind open.
You're right - it's not music making, and I think you'll be hard pressed to find an experienced DJ that disagrees with you. What it is, however, is juxtaposing existing music in new and unexpected ways to keep your audience engaged. There are a lot of mediocre DJs out there, (most of the big names even), that simply play anthem after anthem and never really do anything interesting. There are also many who take mixing to the next level and put together sets that keep people on the dance floor. DJs just play records for people. Some are better at it than others, and it's hard to tell the difference if you don't dance.
That being said, one of the things that separates good DJs from great DJs is the ability to not only read and react to a crowd, but anticipate how a crowd will react to a track that's dissimilar to what's being played - thus creating progression. I don't see that ability in this system.
I write trance music.
Most people choose that moronic music because they're brainwashed to buy it.
/.readers) would like what most educated musicians would call "good" music (Schoenberg, Rorem, Berlioz, Coltrane, etc). Before you judge what's "good" and "bad" art, you might want to consider the larger picture and not just your own personal opions.
I don't think so. Imagine you're a bussiness that makes money from music (radio station, record company, etc.). Do you care whether you make that money by selling "good" or "bad" music? No, you just want to make as much money as possible, and that means selling the most product with the least amount of overhead. Clearly it is cheaper to sell people what they already want to hear than to first "brainwash" them into liking something and then selling it to them. Since it doesn't cost any more money to produce "good" music over "bad", it seems apparent that most people that buy music must want to hear this "bad" music. People listen to pop because it's easy to understand. It takes effort to appreciate quality music.
As far as Led Zep, CCR, and Jimi not selling products, I seem to remeber a car commercial a few years ago featuring Hendrix's "Fire". Musically, there is very little difference between CCR and Hanson. Perhaps the image and stigma differ, but they're both basically I-IV-V rock. I Seriously doubt that many people, including educated