Slashdot Mirror
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.
...a USB mood ring?
...but if some of the dancers are on ecstasy you might want to take steps to protect your subwoofer :)
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Since many airplay charts are based on what DJ's play, and the DJ's finally figures out, that we don't like plagerized cloned music, maybe the record companies will stop producing it ...
... it's comming to me ... no they won't - they'll just increase advertising for it, and blame fileswapping for falling sales.
wait
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
But it sounds as though it would be pandering to one's audience rather than creating something new. I mean isn't most music about creating something meaningful to you in the hopes that it connects with someone else? If you tailor the music over a period of time to what your audience responds best to then isn't this just pablum. It's like what most record companies do when they create new mainstream music, pick the most watered down flavours to get the biggest appeal.
I don't know, maybe I just need to get more sleep
-Q
"I was not put on this earth to listen to meat! Frylock..were you?" -Master Shake
I'd love to see what some of the CSound hackers to do with this. CSound is basically a programming language for sound and music, where you define the sound of the instruments as well as what they play programmatically. Take a lisp program to analyze these results and write csound scripts in real time, and you've got a recipe for fun!
Josh Woodward
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.
Wouldn't it favor people with high blood pressure? Seems like the songs that young, fit people like would drop to the bottom of the playlist, and the three geriatrics in the establishment would hear all their big-band faves bubbling to the top.
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....
I am a DJ and run a few clubs of my own.
Lately, people request more and more songs each day, and sometimes I want to ask them if they would like it better to have a jukebox standing in a corner so they canjust choose their favorites all night long.
I'm not particularly fond of the idea of a DJ as a "teacher" or style nazi either, but some guests are so stupid and persistent so you just want to punch them in the face.
After some thought though, if you pick a good playlist maybe this would work, but I have serious problems with the idea of replacing club/radio DJs with computers and playlists.
Now I don't remember what it was that I wanted to say with this rant... =)
:wq!
Mistake number one is calling this "AI." I think the bar for that title is a tad higher, no? Mistake number two is calling this news. People have been diddling with useless biofeedback toys for decades; big deal. You can also buy goggles that give you a reveletory visual experience while you listen to Led Zeppelin. Self-assembling nanoelectronic components are being synthesized, the fundamental thermodynamic nature of DNA is being parsed, and we get this. Does Slashdot need a science editor? Now, maybe they could hook the thing up to 911 so paramedics would be rushed to the scene when another stupid raver took 5X the sensible dosage of yohimbe and collapsed. THAT would be news
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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}}
...but when the wife and I do get away for an evening so that we may get our collective groove on, I always find the music to be more exciting when the DJ lays out a track that I wasn't expecting but works well anyway. I get bored when the same general tempo and melody get rehashed for too longer, which is my main beef against techno/dance music in the first place. (It must not make that much of a difference when you're high on ecstacy :) ) I'm supposing that a system like this would continue playing similar tracks until a general majority of an audience has a negative response to it. But what then? Does it read that everyone is stopping dancing, so it had better switch gears to a slow song? When the best DJs I've been around notice the crowd slowing down, they might throw on something mellow for a bit, but they're moreso busy trying to find the next P-H-A-T phat hook to get people back on the floor.
But I could see this as a pretty neat technology in office waiting areas. If you have to wait around, it would probably be a more tolerable experience if the music system could know what type of mood and guage your response to the current music (or musak as it most likely is).
I suppose it would be pretty cool for home use, too. I don't know if I'd pay for it or not (I don't have that much need for constant background noise), but having a home audio system that could detect my mood and response and play music accordingly would be awfully sweet.
My sigs always suck.
The clubbers are each given a heart monitor, which sends information to the DJ through a wireless link.
This just in: revolutionary new Hearing(tm) technology lets a human DJ bypass the heart monitoring gear altogether and play records based on vocal responses from clubgoers.
You're absolutely right. I'm going to print out your post and put it between my lifetime supply of Zima and New Coke. And then I'm going to go out, climb into my Edsel, and drive to a local theater showing Waterworld in amazing 3D! And then I'm going to wake up and realize that mass america isn't *quite* the brainless sheep that you assume they are. If the value isn't there, it flops. If all it took was money and marketing, you would be using MSBob right now....
Well, sure, people will buy things that are advertised. But it's not an infallible recipe. For instance, the Ford Edsel in the 1950's was the most heavily marketed car to that time, and it was a complete failure. Hundreds of millions $$$ (1950's $$$, about 20 to one today) wasted.
Wouldn't it be better if they could sell music without risk, and without marketing costs?
If this stuff is going to be used to pick MP3's based on mood, I think we'll see a lot more suiside attempts.
Do you realy want a Smiths album when you are allready fealling depressed
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
It was the most miserable time of my life; I didn't know his selection of music, and worse, I had a group of people evenly split between "we just want you to slap on some country records" and "make it groove, man". If I had any TALENT at what I was doing, I might have found a way to split the difference, and apparently my friend was able to do just fine after he arrived (they accused him of doing a Bad DJ/Good DJ switcheroo on them :-).
The point? Mixing music and working a crowd successfully so that everyone (or the majority) is having a good time takes a lot of talent, and I wouldn't slam it until you've been in those moccasins.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
For extra credit, if marketing people are so stupid, why do they earn more than you?
For extra extra credit, if marketing is so easy and lucrative, why don't you go and do it, and write free software in your copious spare time?
for extra extra extra credit, if you lack the "social skills" to be a marketeer because you're "an engineer who only cares about the right way to do things", what makes you so sure that your intutions about what the public likes are accurate?
Triple points if you know more than two people who don't share your personal taste in music.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
It's nice to see that a new buzzword has emerged to allow people to gloss-over topics they don't get, or aren't willing to desribe in detail. The uses are infinite:
WSJ: Microsoft's new product uses genetic algorithms to make Windows XP easy to use!
Programmer: Well, we actually used several perl and php scripts to talk to MySQL to sort and manage user data.
Marketing document: Our product uses genetic algorithms to sort and manage user data.
Boss: So how does this program work?
Me: Well, I take input from the user, run it through a genetic algorithm and the output is what is expected.
Boss: Great! Ship it!
Macross Plus? The people at the Sharon Apple (virtuoid idol) concerts were fitted with bracelets that monitored everyone's vitals. The computer people modified the music and lighting to control everyone's mood. By the end of the movie Sharon Apple was able to sorta do mind control on people. This is what I wanna see next time I go to a concert!
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.
If you think the idea of a good night is to have everyone collapsing after hours and hours of insane heart activity, then maximizing heart rythm would be a good fitness function. If you want to vary the speed and peoples response, then you have the fitness function vary over the course of the night.
As simple as that.
It seems as if everyone here assumes that biofeedback absolutely has to be used to have the system maximizing heart rate continuously.
Each of the GAs could get to choose a few tracks, and the DJ chooses a few tracks. After a few tracks, the GAs are assigned fitness values based on whether they match the DJs choice, choose a track from the same album, same artist or same genre (or any other criteria you think are relevant). Then you generate a new generation of GAs, and repeat.
If the DJ has a clear style, and you do your programming right, the GAs should converge on choosing music relatively close to what the DJ would choose in the same circumstances, and their fitness would increase.
Obviously, if used alongside a crappy DJ, this would generate GAs that would make equally crappy choices.
Everyone seems to be obsessed with talking about how DJ's will never be replaced because of their flow and their artistry. "A computer will pander to the audience, play only what they want to hear, and never have such epic progressions or varied styles!"
Bullshit.
Artistry or not, DJ'ing consists of the following:
- a library of songs/tricks/skills
- knowledge of what songs work with what
- tailoring predefined progressions toward your audience
Now, most DJ's as artists tend to not even think about this. Something just instantly feels right, so that's what goes on next. But really, it feels right because they know that it's going to compliment the current song, the current mood, and will lead to someplace where the DJ is similarly comfortable.
Just because the crowd doesn't expect it doesn't mean the DJ doesn't either. (Triple negative, woohoo!)
My point is, DJ'ing comes down to making decisions based upon some sets of knowledge. I think it is very possible for a computer to mimic this. A library of songs is easy to build. A reference of what songs work well with others is possible, both through a DJ's input, or noting how a crowd responded to the two mixed together weighted by the rest of the mood of that session. A list of progessions that generated certain moods is possible. Mutations upon those to cause those "sudden unexpected surprises" is possible.
And yes, I DJ. With that thing called vinyl.
http://www.sound-hack.org
http://stub.org
http://slub.org
http://kanak.perl.it/music/
http://fals.ch
I'm a professional club/rave DJ, and I've also been in the "scene" for several years just as a raver, so here's my perspective.
DJs such as Christopher Lawrence, Nicholas Bennison, Sandra Collins will never be replaced by a program like this. The organization of their sets and impeccable taste in tracks can never be replaced by aritifical intelligence. What they do is as much an act of pure human artistry as Mozart or Chopin.
That said, what _most_ rave/club DJs produce is just a bunch of semi-related tracks beatmatched together in a more or less random order. A program like this could easily match or beat your average human DJ in this regard. Especially because the article specified that the program is mixing together prewritten tracks (I assume written by humans). If it was composing completely from scratch I doubt that it would be very compelling.
One final point: many people don't realize this, but a big part of what makes rave/club music sound the way that it does is the fact that it's on vinyl. In particular, the sound of two tracks mixing together (mainly the way the waveforms for the bassdrums interact) is very distinct, and a big part of the live DJ sound. You don't get this sound when people are mixing with CDs, you don't get it when performers are playing "live" with synthesizers, and you won't get it from a computer (assuming that it is not using a robotic arm and turntables to play the tracks).
This will be so disheartening to a vast number of artists when the biofeedback tells the DJ what the clubbers REALLY think of some of the music being played today.
Suddenly tunes that lack any structures of sound such as beat, melody, rhythm or harmony are going to be proven once and for all to be the crap that they are. And poorly written lyrics that aren't in tune, in synch, or lack rhythm AND rhyme are going to throw the music straight out.
In the end the dancers are going to learn that most of the music they THOUGHT they like, their bodies really don't, and the DJ is going to be left with nothing left to play.
Finally we won't have to listen to Destiny's Child anymore.
...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Would you enjoy to watch a soccer match, with only robots, executing programmed tasks?
I suppose that live musicians said the same when dance halls were becominng "discotheques".
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I understood that biofeedback implied that the feed goes back to the measured being, the dancers, thus enabling a self regulating control loop. I'd call this "biotelemetry" or something.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
While in the Chicago airport recently I thought of something similar, though admitted much simpler. The tunnel that connects the two United terminals (B&C?) has a bunch of neon lights arranged in rainbow patterns that cycle through various blinking patterns. The sound system is playing the "United Airlines Music" while you look at the flashing lights. I suggested to my brother as we calmly rode the people mover (we weren't in a hurry) that it would be interesting to have a system that could monitor the number of people in the tunnel. It could then make the music and the lights change according to the number of people. Lots of people could cause louder, faster music and wildly blinking neon lights while just a few people could cause the system to make the lights and music a much more calming experience. Then you could watch people's reactions to see if the hectic music made a frantic situation even worse. You could also switch the system around and see if you could slow large crowds of people by playing softer, slower music. My brother thought it was an interesting idea but said that you'd probably be sued when some 55 year-old business man came through and had a heart attack due to the extra stress of going through such a tunnel.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Do you want it to put on music that matches your mood? Or do you want it to put on music to move you to another mood?
Imagine a biofeedback mp3 playlist owned by a depressive person that puts on happy music when he's feeling low. Could be one way of looking at it.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Actually, the club owner would setup the system such that if *not enough* people are at the bar the music will become awful. I'm half serious here: club owners make their money on selling a rum & coke for $7. It's not in their interest to have people *only* on the dance floor all night.
Yet I can guarantee you that there's a vasy majority of people who could sit down and learn the 5 chords needed to play almost all the popular alt-rock songs out now.
*Enter Surly Abrasive Mode* (so what about karma?)
House and trance are two completely different things, and even such an "amazing" musician as yourself could figure this out. Hell, even Lars Ulrich could do it. it's a lot more than just a "bunch of druggies dancing to a steady bass thumping". Saying that is like saying that Rock is "a bunch of jocks and hicks standing around a couple guys plaing the same chord over and over again and droning on about some pointless crap." But by the looks of your post then this may have hit a bit too close to home. Maybe if you opened you eyes and your mind (try it for a change) you'd learn that "electronic" music is a term as broad as "Rock & Roll". I'm sure that you know that alternative is different than death metal, right?
*End rant mode*
And no, if you haven't guessed, I'm not the biggest fan of Rock. Personally, I find it boring and petty and having to listen to RHCP makes me want to vomit blood, but that's not saying that it doesn't have musical insight and value. Yeah, the good artists are extremely good at what they do. When you listen to something you just get used to the more subtle nuances (that means little differences*) of that style. I listen to trance and pick out pitch variations and the melody behind them. I imagine you can hear things that I'd never have heard in the latest Tool CD (or what-have-you).
But the point of the thing is that you can't take the work of an artist (you try DJ'ing and see how "easy" it is) and turn it into an algorithm**. it's an equivalent to having a computer write songs and (crappy) lyrics.
* Note: (if something is not like something else, then it's different)
** An algorithm is something to do with computers
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
Who said anything about being brainless? Listen; MONEY drives the music industry. And guess who spends the most money on music: Teenage girls aged 14 - 21. Guess what music they like: Pop/Dance. They're not brainless, or brainwshed, they like it. And when I was younger, I did to. And so did you. So get of your high horse... If youw ant to change the music out there, the only way is to buy what you want, and kep buying. If enough people buy music of genre X, more music of genre X will be produced.
The RIAA doesn't want to contorl your minds, or control the type of music you listen to. They want to make money. Thats it.