Comments on: Seraphim and Artificial Intelligence in Music

By: jorm

jorm — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:35:56 +0000

In reply to gnat23.

Re: Ah, good times

I have been thinking about rebuilding it - if only the AI engine. I wish the universe were better about allowing Cool Things into existence.

By: gnat23

gnat23 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:33:55 +0000

In reply to cyclopea.

Re: Ah, good times

Yes, I have fond memories of DJ games. And I got into SO MUCH MUSIC that I might never have known about. Kind of a Pandora/Genius/thing now, but none of them have the sort of impromptu creativity flow/zen we got into.

By: ultraswank

ultraswank — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:38:18 +0000

It has become self aware, DESTROY IT BEFORE IT KILLS US ALL!!!!!!!

By: eto_theipi

eto_theipi — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:23:09 +0000

In reply to jorm.

You and I discussed multiple genres, but I didn't actually help to construct the genre map.

When I was classifying my own music collection (before I gave up), I was using keywords like "dark" and "noise" and "synth", rather than "genres" in a lot of cases. Some genres give a pretty good idea of what the music is going to sound like (in my collection "ska" or "dub"), but things like "rock" or "electronica" are too big.

By: cyclopea

cyclopea — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:25:01 +0000

Ah, good times

I still miss Seraphim. Those DJ games were fun, totally made my early days at Planet Moon zip by with smiles.

By: jorm

jorm — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:59:59 +0000

In reply to inoah.

Sadly, I lost a bunch of my code archives during a system rebuild. I made big tarballs of everything, and they ran afoul of the "maximum file size" thing that older Linuxes suffered from.

The genre map was hand constructed by me and (I think) Aneel. We pulled down a bunch of genre tags from AllMusic and worked from there.

The biggest pain was applying multiple genres to individual MP3s. In iTunes, what I do to solve that problem (only one genre tag) is I set multiple genres with semi-colons.

Thus, Nirvana may be "Alternative; Grunge; Punk", while Metallica is "Metal; Speed" and R.E.M. is "Alternative; Rock". Barry Manilow is "Rock; Soft".

So I can set a smart playlist for "Genre [contains] 'Alternative'" and both REM and Nirvana may show up.

I'm a bit anal retentive about this, too.

Thinking about this now, I have a yen to recreate the damned thing, only smarter, better, faster. I've got about 8 years more experience with this type of stuff now, and having a streaming stereo system might not be a bad idea.

By: spooky_lemur

spooky_lemur — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:40:22 +0000

The more I see in the world the more I am convinced that true AI will come from programs like this or games and not from the military, computer labs or big business as it is often portrayed in SciFi.

By: inoah

inoah — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:14:36 +0000

I remember talking to you about the genre proximity problem and I thought other than having people work out a spatial map by hand it wouldn't be solvable. It sounds like you did some approximation of that? And I assumed Apple did something similar for itunes' genius mode.

I really miss Seraphim. Which reminds me, I don't suppose the code is still available? I would mind using it for my private library. I won't benefit from the emergent behavior we saw from it being on the internet but it *was* a pretty damned good auto-DJ.