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One of my ongoing research interest areas is in retrieval interfaces that allow more expressive and powerful statements of a user information need. In that spirit, I wrote a minor rant last April about how the Apple iTunes smart playlist creation interface sacrifices functionality in the interest of simplicity. One could only create smart [...]
TechCrunch is reporting a new Google Music service, purportedly to be released in about a week here in the U.S.:
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking to the big four music labels about the new service, we’ve heard from one of our sources. And he [...]
There is an interesting recent post about the history of Google Music in China from an article by Michael Zhang in Global Entrepreneur Magazine. Some excerpts:
“It will play the right music without you having to give it any thought.” You get the music you want at the right time, for the right environment, and in the right mood. Well, it sounds unrealistic that one’s thoughts can actually control music. Yet like the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Revolutionary technologies like electrical power, airplanes and search engines have all changed the world in ways that were out of expectation. To some extent, Google’s second edition of their music search product, launched on March 30 by Hong Feng and his team, fulfilled the criteria in some way. When Google China’s president Li Kaifu [who by now quit Google] and executives from hundreds of record companies posed for a photograph at the media conference, people might have ignored the fact that this product transcended reality on at least two levels.
They’re calling Google Music, an extremely late entrant into the music search business, a revolutionary, magical technology that transcends reality? Are you kidding me? Have they forgotten about Moodlogic (1998)? Shazam (2000)? Pandora (2000 or 2004, depending on whether you’re talking B2B or B2C)? Last.fm (2004)? Echo Nest (2005-ish?) How does Google Music China compare with the solutions provided by these other companies?
Google Music unprecedentedly enriched the way people find music. You can find a song through the name of artist, titles of the song, albums, or even a sentence of lyric, and you can also play the hottest songs from the charts. However, the most impressive breakthroughs are these two functions – one can have music recommendations according to difference of the tempo, tone, and timber; similar songs are recommended according to the timber of specific songs. Fresh experience it offers and the technical complexity in its realization makes it the most ambitious and imaginative work of Google after it entered China.
“Unprecedentedly”? Come on. It’s totally “precedented”. Continue reading…
If you haven’t heard (probably not likely), Apple announced a number of upgrades to its iPod/iTunes product line today. It is interesting to me because I see more and more Music Information Retrieval making it into consumer products. Genius added smart playlisting a year or two ago (though from the reviews it doesn’t perform [...]
“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” is the title of a new Wired article. In it, Robert Capps makes the following point:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.” And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip [video camera]. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.
Capps goes on to make his point using a number of examples: The Flip video camera (easy). Web apps (no installation). Mp3s (small file size). Even healthcare. Quality, he says, is no longer measured by fidelity and richness of experience. It is measured by convenience.
I suppose I cannot argue with empiricism. What is is what is, and the article as a whole seems fairly descriptively accurate. But let me wax normative for a moment. Continue reading…
From Wired:
Vevo will launch later this year, a collaboration between Universal Music Group and Google the partners expect to be the leading music video service in the world from day one. Google confirmed to Wired.com Thursday that all of Universal Music Group’s video assets (music videos, interviews, concert footage and possibly Kyte-style backstage [...]
Music Information Retrieval continues to be an excellent place to play around with the intersection of search, recommendation, user-guided exploration, and explanatory (transparent) algorithms.
First, check out the announcement of Music Explaura from Stephen Green at Sun Research. Stephen writes:
Continue reading…
Well, the move comes 9 years after I suggested it to ‘em, but Google finally launches a music service:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/03/reuters_us_google_china
Now, my only question is whether they have simultaneously been researching and implementing intelligent search algorithms to go with the free music downloads, or whether they have been too busy moving Microsoft Office into [...]
At SXSW this year, Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest and Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine engaged in a head-to-head panel about the utility of:
- Using computer algorithms (e.g. collaborative filtering, tag-based, content-based, etc.) to automatically recommend music, versus
- Using computers to (a) connect people who can directly recommend music to each other and (b) provide contextually relevant information around any shared songs
Perhaps I don’t fully understand the full subtlety of the conflict, but I find myself wondering: Why can’t you do both?
Continue reading…
Long-time Music Information Retrieval researcher Pedro Cano has a new book out, based on his dissertation: “Content-based Audio Search: From Audio Fingerprinting to Semantic Audio Retrieval“. From the review:
Music search sound engines rely on metadata, mostly human generated, to manage collections of audio assets. Even though time-consuming and error-prone, human labeling is a common practice. Audio content-based methods, algorithms that automatically extract description from audio files, are generally not mature enough to provide the user friendly representation that users demand when interacting with audio content. This dissertation has two parts. In a first part we explore the strengths and limitation of a pure low-level audio description technique: audio fingerprinting. In the second part, we hypothesize that one of the problems that hinders the closing the semantic gap is the lack of intelligence that encodes common sense knowledge and that such a knowledge base is a primary step toward bridging the semantic gap. We present a sound effects retrieval system which leverages both low-level and semantic technologies.
Continue reading…
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