iTunes Genius Open Thread
OK, this is the post that had to happen eventually…
iTunes 8 most vaunted feature is Genius: “Play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together.” Sounds fun!
First up I selected “Her Song” by Hungry Lucy, a laid-back, electro “trip-pop” outfit from Cincinnati. Sure enough, Genuis constructed a playlist of cruisy, chillout songs like “Finished Symphony” by Hybrid, “Teardrop” by Massive Attack, and a lot of stuff from the gentler end of Faithless, VNV Nation, Smashing Pumpkins, and Assemblage 23.
And “Smack My Bitch Up” by The Prodigy.
Oh well…
I’m reminded of the John Cusack character in High Fidelity, who makes mix-tapes as a way of picking up women. I wonder whether Genius is going to ruin that age-old last-resort for the terminally geeky?
I’d like to hear your own Genius stories…
Your Comments
Matthew Smith writes:
I only just realised I could do it after reading this post! Earlier this year I ran an experiment using last.fm where I followed the first similar artist according to last.fm that I had in my collection. The idea was that I would kind of journey through my collection in a six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon way but what I found was that I have lots of islands that aren’t connected to other artists I own, so only the really popular bands got a look in. I wonder if Genius is also biased towards popular artists when it does its playlists? Initial investigation would suggest so. By pressing ‘refresh’ I reckon it is selecting a bunch of albums similar to the one from which the song you selected comes and then selecting random tracks from those albums.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 14:49 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
I take it back, Genius does appear to match on individual songs similarity somehow! It can pick songs with a similar feel or texture.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 14:53 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Stuff I’ve read suggests that as well as genre and date it takes into account things like number of times played, rating, and even BPM, as well as aggregating information uploaded by other users. (Which probably means we should be worried about the privacy implications). But also means that the selections should become better over time.
I’m having fun playing with it, but am a little surprised at how often the same songs keep appearing. Maybe it’s telling me I should broaden my listening habits…
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 14:58 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
If you’re looking for a playlist of similar tracks, then you want to use an n-dimensionsal distance calculation where the dimensions are genre, BPM, date and maybe even some fourier analysis. However, a good playlist isn’t just about similarity, it’s about sensing changing mood and occasionally doing a “reset” where you might follow a fast intense track with something gentle and vice-versa. Timing comes into play but I’m sure you could teach a learning algorithm such as a neural network or a genetic algorithm to generate many playlists where you give it feedback on how good it’s selections are. Computer generated music often uses learning algorithms with the composer as the teacher.
I’m thinking about this because I’m about to dive into writing an essay on the philosophy of computer learning.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 15:50 | Permanent link to this comment
Sam writes:
Because one of the things Genius uses to generate the similar songs lists is playlists in your library, it will be less accurate for people who make large shuffle lists, such as the Hottest 100 random for example.
Genius is good for when you want to listen to some music and not engage with it fully, but it can never fully replace the guy selecting each song one song at a time to ensure the best flow possible. It doesn’t matter how accurate it gets, it is a machine and that little touch of human to a playlist is what makes it really engaging.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 17:02 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
I selected “Lovely Head” by Goldfrapp and got a lot of Air, Portishead, Bjork, Massive Attack, Moby …. and Basement Jaxx “Where’s your head at”. This is quite addictive.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 22:04 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
Beach Boys “I Get Around” confused it mightily. The best one in this list is Devo “Whip It”.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 22:08 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Oh, that was just to wake you up again!
Admittedly I’m mainly running this at work, where I have a pretty limited library (about 800 songs), but every genius playlist I create seems to contain Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”.
Posted: 13 10 2008 - 22:10 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
Songs that Genius wants to include in every playlist no matter what: Devo “Whip It”, The Band “The Weight”, Cat Stevens “Wild World”, Crowded House “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, Cardigans “Lovefool”. I rarely listen to any of these songs (besides “Whip It” of course).
Posted: 15 10 2008 - 10:14 | Permanent link to this comment
Sam writes:
I tried “Knights of Cydonia” and it came up with a list of songs from Guitar Hero 3. Even “Pride and Joy” made the list.
I’m thinking that this is not a coincidence.
Posted: 15 10 2008 - 21:55 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Hey yeah! Now that you mention it, I also tried “Knights of Cydonia” and was rather bemused [oh, not an intentional pun] to find “Pride and Joy” on the playlist. I didn’t think of the GH3 connection.
I wonder whether this means that there are a lot people out there who have compiled iTunes playlists of GH songs, and Genius is picking up on that?
Posted: 16 10 2008 - 08:51 | Permanent link to this comment
Greg writes:
Like I said to you last night John, what happened to agency? It just seems so tragic to hand over control of something to an algorithm when (most often) so much thought has gone in to creating and that (one would hope) you as listener actually feel quite passionate about. I’m not saying that music can’t have different functions, of course you may sometimes just want sonic wallpaper, but still, I’d like to have some say in what that sonic wallpaper is. I have to fess up though that this comment is coming from someone who just simply can’t do the whole mp3 thing. I’m still CDs and preferably vinyl. And don’t give me that whole ‘you can’t even hear the difference’ line, because if you can’t it just means you’ve got a shit stereo. You want me to ruin your mp3 enjoyment for ever more? Unless you’ve got minimal compression, listen carefully for cymbals in anything you listen to and then go listen to the real cd through some good speakers. No difference my hairy codec. Still, I have to admit to being somewhat curious as to what it would do to parts of my library vast chunks of which are filled with Merzbow, KK Null and the like. But to find out I’d have to rip about 4000 cds and to be honest….
Posted: 17 10 2008 - 09:35 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
Agreeing with Greg: there are artifacts in mp3s which can become annoying but you can also use a lossless format such as flacc. I find mp3s amazing just from a geek point of view for all the ways they can approximate the music using joint stereo, variable bit rates and sucking heaps of high frequency detail out of them. If I was serious, I would re-rip all my CDs to flacc but that would take too long and the mp3s are adequate for my little earbud headphones at work.
But more to the original point, ipods and Genius playlists have changed the way we listen to music. I used to sit down with a new album and listen to it all the way through a few times and I would get to know all the songs and associate them with each other in a certain order. Now I listen to it once or twice, rip it and I might not even know what songs are on there. Since I realised this, I’ve gone back to listening to whole albums. Even compilations and best-ofs have some order to them that makes sense even if it’s just chronological.
Posted: 17 10 2008 - 11:27 | Permanent link to this comment
Philip writes:
GREG,
I love it when music “connoisseurs” list off bands like KK Null and Merzbow while spewing crap such as: “don’t give me that whole ‘you can’t even hear the difference’ line, because if you can’t it just means you’ve got a shit stereo”.
Noise “music” was never meant to be enjoyed in the conventional sense. The whole point of that type of music puts into question the legitimacy of there being such a thing as a “shit stereo” (and, simultaneously, a “quality stereo”). It puts into question the difference between what sounds good and what doesn’t.
Get it? My sound system probably costed a sixth of what yours did, and, by the logic of artists such as KK Null and Merzbow, it probably sounds 50 times better. :)
And by the way, it is hard for me to believe that a person who actually cares as much about music as you pretend to would have 4,000 records. Even if you listened to a different one each day (that is, really listen, like you encouraged when you said: “listen carefully for cymbals”) you wouldn’t listen to the same album more than 8 times in a lifetime…
I’d rather have 4,000 great songs on my ipod, than own 4,000 mediocre albums. Hey, but I prefer not to waste money – I’m a quality over quantity kinda person…
Hope I didn’t ruin your cd enjoyment. :)
Posted: 9 12 2008 - 04:45 | Permanent link to this comment
Greg writes:
Well, in the interests of healthy exchange. The concept that all noise music is supposed to be listened to on bad quality equipment and that somehow it is in fact ideologically tied to that is a little absurd when you think about the care that goes in to the production of some noise music. OK, let’s stick with the Merzbow example. Why would Russell Haswell and Masami Akita release Satanstornade on vinyl and CD, mastering the two differently, if the specificities of the medium were not supposed to come into play? Some would probably say that hardware is also inconsequential when listening to hardcore / noisecore bands like Converge, and the only response to that can be to say that such people must never have had the opportunity to do the comparison. And let’s not forget that a lot of variants of noise music, especially extreme minimalism, are not just a sonic assault and so yes, there also, to get what’s going on, especially with some of the complex spatialisation work that you get in someone like Ryoji Ikeda, you need some decent equipment- how i wish i had a 5.1 system for some of that stuff released on dvd. There are of course various levels of this discourse and so I’m not arguing that only valve amps are going to render the music as it “should” be heard, there comes a point when your budget and good sense have to kick in (so I doubt my stereo cost 6 times yours, unless you only have a nano, in which case then yes, probably). What I’m saying is that there’s a big difference between an ipod with earbuds and a semi-decent stereo and that the inferior quality of the former is compounded by compression. And of course such is the nature of time and finite lifetimes that there are some albums that are only listened to a few times. I can’t be bothered to check your math, but I assure you many are listened to many more than 8 times. But even those that are only listened to a few times, call me old-fashioned but I’ll always prefer to buy it as a material artefact, to see the work that has gone into the art, and listen to it somewhere other than on the bus to work. It’s what I call quality listening. And it’s not incompatible with quantity. And come to think of it, what if genius never picks a certain track for you because there are so many and its algorithms don’t like that one? Are you seriously claiming that downloaders only download quality stuff that they listen to carefully and don’t just plunder massively and store stuff that is never actually played? Doesn’t the fact of actually going out and buying something necessarily signal a greater personal let alone financial investment in music?
And don’t worry Phil, you could never ruin my cd enjoyment.
Posted: 9 12 2008 - 09:44 | Permanent link to this comment