On November 20, 2009, drew Roberts wrote: > On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 9:06 PM, Gordon Haverland > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On November 19, 2009, Clint Adams wrote: > >> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 12:36:56AM +0100, Maciej Łoziński wrote: > >> > What is the state of the recommendation/stats engine of > >> > libre.fm? I made a quick look at the code, and haven't > >> > noticed anything in subject. Is anyone > >> > coding/designing/thinking of it at the time? > > snip > > > 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 we want to do something like this right, will we not need > some player cooperation? A toggle to send along info as to > whether this series of plays is from a personally hand ordered > playlist or not. (personally chosen order versus randome, > computer chosen or "other" chosen of some sort. > > snip
I think it would be useful to know whether the scrobbling is coming from a hand ordered list, from some music player's idea of random, or from some external source. Supposedly a hand compiled list what not see the user skipping to the end of a song. For using some music player's definition of random, you might find users more often skipping to the end of song. In listening to an external source, the only thing which comes to mind is the Love/Hate tags which Last.fm uses (or used to use). Do any music players give information on music sources? How many have Love/Hate options? Gordon Haverland pisze: > 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. Me too. I'm starting to notice that people are finding more obtuse than usual, which is not a good thing. I don't like to be seen that way. >> 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? Some people think of shuffling a deck of cards when playing songs at random. One idea of random is we shuffle the deck (well). We then draw songs in order until the deck is exhausted. In that version, there is no probability of playing the same song more than once, unless that song occurs in the person's collection more than once. In that situation, it is possible that the same song can be played multiple times, one after another. Another option is drawing cards at random, with replacement. We draw a card (song) and start playing it. We then put the card back in the deck, and reshuffle. This mechanism never ends (the deck is never exhausted). Again, we have the probability of listening to the same song back to back, with one different song in between, .... We can incorporate nearest neighbour correlations, if song A plays, it makes it unlikely that B plays next and it makes it likely that C plays next. This can get carried to higher and higher order correlations. There are some albums which tell a story across all the songs of the album. Imaginos by Blue Oyster Cult comes to mind. If in the course of drawing songs at random, what happens if I draw a song from that album? Do I want to play the entire album in order? Do I want to play from that song to the end of album in order? Do I want to just play that song? What happens if the next draw (the draw after, the draw after that, ...) is from that same album? As I said, there are lots of things involved in playing songs "at random" that people can take issue with. >> 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". I suppose if you are listening to the tag "hard rock" that won't happen. But if you listen to user fortran2's radio station (currently at 347446 plays), you are going to find jumps because I listen to classical, country, rock, folk, jazz, blues and some other stuff. >> 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? Building things at random is all inherently the same process. It doesn't matter whether you are making random integers, random float points that are uniform 0-1, or anything else. But applications such as random text and random music have expectations (correlations) that people may want to use. But working with extended correlations does come with a computational burden. You need to draw more than one random number to find the next song. But time consuming part is comparing the other random numbers to complicated probability functions in order to decide yes or no (or to pick a song). >> 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. Sorry, I'm getting obtuse here. If someone is looking for recommendations on rock, the fact I listen to stuff other than rock shouldn't preclude my listening habits from being useful. If what goes into recommendations is only the songs themselves, this is easily done. If a person is looking at correlations between songs (what is the probability of hearing Don't Fear (The Reaper) immediatley after listening to Sharp Dressed Man), then people whose listening habits cross gendres can introduce problems. Immediately after isn't as much a problem as one (or more) song in between. Because the person looking for 1 song inbetween correlations, isn't expecting The Four Seasons by Vivaldi as the song in between. >> 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? Probably being obtuse again. There are false statistics out there as well. And the split between Country/Western and Top-40 is a good example. I think there are a number of people who listen to Top-40 and hate Country/Western because they have been conditioned to think that way. And I think there are a number of people who started listening to Country/Western because they wanted to be different (not following the masses by listening to Top-40). Should recommendations try to bridge the gap? There are a few songs that have made the top of the charts in both Top-40 and Country/Western. Those songs probably make good recommendations. If they are open to that, they may eventually find parts of the "enemy" gendre that aren't that bad. Not that I think many Top-40 people are going to be listening to "John Deere Tractor". But they might find enjoyment in THE TRUCK GOT STUCK by Corb Lund. It probably helps a little if they live somewhere on the Great Plains however (lots of people don't know about the genetically modified canola varieties like Roundup-Ready Canola that exist). > 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 ;-) Actually, I think that the "better DJs" (at radio stations) out there would probably do well to have their playlists entered as users at Libre.fm. And then they would be able to get recommendations of other songs to play, instead of just pushing whatever the music people want pushed that week. :-) I'll have to think about your second note a bit Maciej. Take care. Gord _______________________________________________ Libre-fm mailing list [email protected] http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/libre-fm
