holy mashup, mashup man!

I was recently accused by an associate of being a "mashup master" (because I never actually make anything from scratch I guess).  I don't think I really fit the title, but this Kutiman fellow absolutely does.  The music video below is entirely produced from the integration of different utube videos.  I'm no expert in music or in music-mashups, but I think this is pretty special.  

This shou serve as an inspiration for anyone who is thinking about what they might do with music or other forms of data on the Web.  (Listen for at least about 45 seconds - the cool thing is how the song develops.)

headphones

This morning I decided to stay home to concentrate on the new and surprisingly involved task of designing and coding up the pattern for subject-task assignment for an upcoming experiment such that the paltry number of subjects I'm likely to be able to recruit will provide me with that magical value of the P family sought after by so many other desperate graduate students like wolves after a wounded moose. (Wow, check out the length of that intro sentence!). Anyway, as I settled down to think through my design, I was plagued by one auditory distraction after another - car alarms, truck engines, my neighbor's bass, even jackhammers (I kid you not). Growingly increasingly frustrated with the noise and my inability to concentrate, I realized that the solution was not less noise, but more noise! I strapped on my headphones and went back to work. In 5 minutes I was not only working more effectively, I was calmer and frankly happier.

I've heard many people, usually a few years my superior, complain about people listening to music while they 'should be working'. I wonder if this reaction has anything to do with the fact that they grew up in a time when it was actually possible to find a quiet place to work on a regular basis? Now, in increasingly compressed living and working quarters, it seems that music is one of the few ways left to provide oneself with a bit of cognitive privacy.

Do you listen while you work? What is your favorite artist/genre for getting something done?

the day i tried to live [write]

A verse from Soundgarden's "The day I tried to live" has been echoing in my head for weeks.

Words you say never seem
To live up to the ones
Inside your head

I currently have between 2 and 5 papers actively in process (how many depends on how we decide to split the ideas up) and the feeling is always the same. I think I know what I want to say, but when the words come out, they are as clear as mud - never living up to the visions inside my head. This feeling leads me into seemingly endless, certainly inefficient cycles of revisions that often do not seem to be improving the end product. Upon having a look at the lyrics to that song, I was struck again by its relevance to my current mental predicament.

One more time around
Might do it
One more time around
Might make it
One more time around
Might do it
One more time around
The day I tried to live [write..]

Music Recommenders

Just wanted to point out a really good post comparing the differences between Last.fm and Pandora (circa January 2006). In a nutshell, both services compile databases used to make decisions about which songs/artists are similar to one another and then use these decisions to create playlists automatically based on some seed (e.g. songs that are somehow like songs from the Beatles).  Last.fm does this mainly by looking at who likes what (data cleverly extracted from things like iTunes via their "scrobbler" as well as through direct user preference statements) while Pandora utilizes manually (by them) annotated musical features of the songs themselves such as "subtle use of vocal harmony" and "mild use of rhythmic syncopation".  

Steve Krause's post is a nice, in-depth look at the differences that hold between these two contrasting approaches to musical knowledge acquisition.  Its a great exploration of professional/intentional/manual versus amateur/extensional/semi-automatic content creation - especially because both services are so good!  The only downside is that the post is now a bit dated.  As he predicted it would, Pandora is definitely picking up and almost certainly applying user-generated data now (its even connected to Facebook) - which makes it harder to segregate the two systems. 

Of course, I'm curious what Pandora might be able to achieve by encouraging and enabling their users to annotate songs for them.  Do you think you could correctly identify the mild use of rhythmic syncopation? I probably couldn't, but it would be cool if they showed me how.

At Last - Last.fm

Last.fm has been on my radar for almost a year but I've just now actually gotten around to trying it out.  In a nutshell , I LOVE IT!  I can't see myself ever using itunes party shuffle ever again...  Its rare to come across something that you immediately know that you will use on a regular basis for the foreseeable future - I think this is the first time thats ever happened to me.

Pulled together automatically by Last from my itunes library...

"Can't be done..."

I just can't resist this.. Microsoft has succeeded in producing something called photosynth that looks truly fantastic, a mechanism to link pictures (from any source e.g. flikr) together into cohesive, zoomable, navigable, QTVR-like virtual worlds. Have a look at one of the most impressive demos you will see this year here.

If it doesn't have this functionality already, it will undoubtedly be linked to geo-spatial coordinates as discussed in this post about Google Street View, thus completing the complete "virtualization" of the real world. Ahem, wow!

What I can't resist noting for posterity is that I suggested exactly this idea to several of my friends nearly three years ago and they unanimously dismissed it as impossible (mostly the stitching problems). This is akin to a similar situation in which I suggested the development of a system that would allow musicians to play together online, simultaneously which was similarly panned as impossible, this time do to network latency. Now, of course, you can visit ejamming.com to experience exactly what I had proposed.

Not to be too whiny, I hope, lessons learned:

ignore doubts (and doubters)

in a world with 6 billion+ people in it, the value of a single idea is minimal, no matter how novel, in comparison to the value of the work that goes into actually making it happen. There are probably thousands of people that have dreamed up these things independently, kudos to those that made them reality!

it sure would be nice to have the resources of Microsoft (case a) or Aerosmith (case b) to back up your lunatic ideas..

I can't wait to see what comes next :)