Gordon Haverland pisze: > > Hello. > > I really don't need more interruptions in my attempt to find work > as a professional engineer in Materials Science and Engineering (I > have Autism, finding work is difficult), but diversions are often > useful to allow the subconcious to work on a problem in peace. >
It's great that you spent some time on sharing your thoughts though. I wish you success in finding great job as soon as possible. > You aren't asking about playing music randomly, but I will start > there. If you ask 20 people about how they define random plays of > music, you will probably get somewhere between 10 and 20 different > definitions. And all of them are correct. > Doesn't just random mean random? What do you exactly have on your mind? > What Last.fm seems to do, is to look at correlations between songs > "owned" by different people. To be imprecise, if someone has some > particular hard rock song in their inventory, what is the > probability that they also have some opera of Vivaldi. > Exactly :-) > If we look at how people want to listen to music, their listening > habits are seldom that simple. You can find people who enjoy both > hard rock and classical, but if they decide to listen to hard > rock, they do not want to have their playlist suddenly jump into > classical. > Yes, but *generally*, such jumps are rare, and when you want to listen to "hard rock" om last.fm, you get mostly hard rock, and when you get something that you don't want to hear, you just click "next". > To consider text, some people are interested in constructing > "random text". Perhaps a good example for more complicated text > construction is Lorem Ipsum. > I don't get what text has to do with music. Or is it some sort of parallell? > We can observe correlations between people's complete libraries, > which I believe (with no proof) is what Last.fm does. We could > look at the time series of songs that people listen to: what is > the probability that a person wants to listen to classical music > within N different songs? If N is small, there is a small > probability that that they might want to listen to a classical > song. We could construct listening recommendations based upon N=1 > (next song to be listened to), N=2 (1 song after the next song), > and so on. We could look at these correlations when restricted to > certain tags (we don't consider the probability of listening to > Alice Cooper N songs after listening to Vivaldi). > Do you mean when somebody listens to a classical track, he'll probably want to listen to another one? If so, that's sort of I was thinking also. > Most people think the idea of making suggestions is simple and > obvious. If you were to question N people as to what they > specifically are looking for, I would expect that you are going to > find something like sqrt(N) different definitions. And all of > them are correct. > Hehe most people are looking for the meaning of life ;-) But if it goes to music, I think there are so many different tastes, as number of people in the world. > The above is handwaving theory. If we look at music statistics > from the music business over the last N years, we run into > problems. If you listen to TOP-40, you will (almost?) never run > across a country/western song. If you look at music sales > statistics, there is an overlap between Top-40 and > Country/Western. What kind of overlap are you thinking about? That people who buy top-40 buy also country and western? > A concious decision has been made by the TOP-40 > people to ignore anythign having to do with Country/Western. And > many people that listen to TOP-40 music insist that they HATE > Country/Western! Even if they have never listened to a single > Country/Western song in their life. Not every song in > Country/Western is about driving a John Deere tractor. > That all seems true, but what's the point? > How does a recommendation algorithm deal with irrational > rejections, such as ALL Country/Western songs are to be rejected? > When somebody doesn't want to listen to country/western, that's ok for me. I don't think we have to deal with that, even if maybe it's irrational. But also it's very possible that neither top-40 listeners nor country/western listeners will come across libre.fm ;-) > Sorry, no solutions. I have done statistics a long time, and I > have thought about how one plays music "at random". > > Take care. > Gord > _______________________________________________ > Libre-fm mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/libre-fm _______________________________________________ Libre-fm mailing list [email protected] http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/libre-fm
