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"?
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 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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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
Most people choose Pop music. It's that simple.
Most people choose that moronic music because they're brainwashed to buy it. The airwaves are saturated with idiotic catchy tunes like Hanson, the Spice Girls, N'Sync, etc... That gets into people's subconcious and sticks there telling them that they need to listen to it all the time, and not just when the radio plays it.
Do you think any of these records will have anything more than a historic value 10, 30 years from now? I'm still rocking out to Led Zep, CCR, and Jimi - because they made music, not something that will sell more McDonald's happy meals.
If you want a choice, then support the alternatives, listen to college radio, or live365, or better yet - get the permission for some local artists' recordings, and host your own radio show, then tell people about it.
- passion
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.
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).