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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.
...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
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....
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.
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).