What makes a good playlist? The rhythm of the music? The flow of the songs? The semi-autobiographical narrative that emerges when you put “Mama Said” by The Shirelles immediately after “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida?”
Now, here’s another question: if you had a playlist contest, and compared an expert DJ to a computer algorithm, who would win?
Well, that’s exactly what Paul Lamere did. Paul works for Echo Nest, a music intelligence company. He also writes the blog Music Machinery, which is all about the intersection of music and technology. Right now, Paul’s running an online survey, pitting playlists created by a human being against computer-generated playlists. It’s the same pool of possible songs, but ordered differently.
So, who puts songs in the best order — a computer or a human? To find out, listen to Nora’s full interview with Paul below, or download the MP3. [runs 13:10]
Play audio:
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Hi Spark Crew,
The file for this interview isn’t there.
Thank you,
Should work now. Thanks, Rob.
Just a minor correction: The link for the MP3 download should be http://podcast.cbc.ca/spark/plus-spark_20100910_l… instead of http://podcast.cbc.ca/spark/http://podcast.cbc.ca…
Thanks for the heads-up. Fixed.
In any kind of music play contest, the human DJ would win.
Computerized playlists do only one thing: play music in the order the list was programmed. Depending on the music player being used, they can automatically fade one song out and fade in the next song on the list. The Amarok music player has this feature enabled (depending on which Linux distribution you are using).
Human DJs can also fade songs in and out. However, the human DJ can do much more, including cuts (playing short partial second segments of songs for effect), remixing and (my favourite) "scratching".
There are plenty of videos on YouTube as to how to do this. For example, there is a video of a DJ playing a Phil Collins tune on one turntable, and scratching a record on the other. No computerized playlist can do that.
Note: With record scratching, you are barely placing any pressure on the record itself, and you do not use the whole hand, only a few fingers, and anywhere from the center to the outer edge of the record. You want to temporarily control the record itself, but you do not want to stop the platter.
For this to really work requires a bit of hand-eye coordination, and a sense of what effect you want to hear.
If you really want to see what can be done, watch this performance by a cat!
Great point, that two-way feedback loop is something an algorithmically-generated playlist can't mirror. Paul does say that a challenge with what he's doing here too is that the test doesn't have any context around it, and of course, when we're listening to music, there's always a context for us that shapes what kind of music we want to hear and how.