More on the "Computer as DJ" discussion

Whilst this it totally possible…it won’t be for some time. Tone and emotion aren’t necessarily the same thing. Until the computer can truly feel emotion, its just running off statistics and averages. I for one would much prefer to hear new tracks that are unknown to me than hearing whats on myine or other peoples ipod.

Taste isn’t the same thing as genre. Like, not even close to the same thing. Taste is about personal preference – and the system you’re talking about has no personal preference.|
You’re also confusing deductive logic with intelligence (which is based, in part, on inductive logic).

Seriously, you’re postulating an automatic jukebox. These already exist – and pose no threat to the people I think of as good DJs. The difference between a DJ and a jukebox: the DJ makes choices based on his or her own knowledge, as filtered through his or her own personal taste. A jukebox plays what the punters tell it to.

Whether the punters tell the jukebox by voice, or by their phone jiggling when they’re shagging some girl in the toilets – wait, dancing their behind off on the floor, it still has no relevance to what I do as a DJ.

*shrugs*

why are you even entertaining such an idea… people on the dance floor generally don’t have good taste in music that is why they pay to see someone who loves music to play it for them. imagine going into a club with your smart phone and allowing it to scan your library… I don’t know about you but my iphone isn’t full of club bangers, it’s got chilled stuff like liquid drum n bass, hiphop, deeper dubstep, and little rock, what good would it be to play a song of my iphone in a club.. I will also bet that my selection of music is better than most of the peoples there. Even if it scanned youtube views facebook likes etc.. you would get a very stale pool of music as an overwhelming amount of people like crap music that isn’t suitable for clubs, so you would end up with top 40 crap and greatest hits… And I’m not sure if you have noticed but the dj is the focal point for most of the people in clubs, they are there to start and encourage people to party and engage with them, nothing is going to match a human doing it ever! sure someone will make a lot of money globalizing a system that they can sell to pubs and bars, but it will get corrupted when a record company buys it and controls what’s played so they make more money from their artists, which means unless you have skills in software development or a buisness capable of managing such a venture with the capital to invest this is a bad thing for you.

spektakx, post: 20825, member: 1743 wrote: so if I ask you
“what kind of music do you like?”
how will you answer me?

Today? I’d answer that I particularly like music that’s heavily based on rhythm, with overtones that produce a level of discomfort in the listener. I can even explain why – I’m currently a bit upset about some things occurring in my personal life, which tends to lead me towards listening to and playing “difficult” music.

See how this is about a preference, and not constrained by genre?

spektakx, post: 20825, member: 1743 wrote:
“a dj makes choices based on his or her own knowledge”
the computer will have more knowledge of the individual, & the collective, and complex relationships between those
it will have instant access to every music chart, every download stat, every youtube play(and whether the person played the whole song or only part), it will know how many plays were repeats, it will know time of day for plays, it will cross reference DL lists, etc.
all it will really take is a couple of these clubs, and some feedback to the system. connecting the computer to the AC system, and monitoring temp would be a good start. all these things that sound difficult to us, would be very simple for a computer.

That stuff is information. Information is not the same thing as knowledge. See also: Godel’s Theory of Undecidability, Turing’s Halting Problem and the Mandelbrot set (seriously, google that stuff. Mathematics doesn’t work the way you think it works)

Once again, you’re suggesting that an automatic Jukebox replaces what I do. It can’t – the most it can do is play the most “required” tune (when considered statistically). Try it this way: the best night out I’ve ever had was listening to Derrick May play at a little (capacity 500) club here in Wellington.

One of the things Derrick did that night was turn the bass off. For roughly 5 minutes – it felt like longer, and may even have been longer, but I didn’t have a stopwatch on it. The crowd were getting increasingly restless, and disturbed. I can guarantee you that not a single person in that crowd was thinking “I like the music, but I wish he’d kill the bass for an extended period of time”.

When he brought it back in, we all went nuts. See how your alogorithm (stop calling it an AI. It doesn’t actually exhibit many of the features required for intelligence – e.g. experimentation) can’t do this?