Eigenradio = Statistically Optimal Music

Ok so Miles dropped this in my inbox the other day, but I was following the convo on alter slash but like most things on slash dot it was lost before you know and replaced with something just as interesting.
This is from slashdot
ShinyPlasticBag writes “'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.

Anyway so yeah this eigenradio sounds like a intersting project but is somewhat not when you actually listen. Maybe its the slash dot effect, but tell you what it sounds pretty poor at the moment.

The slashdotters have gone crazy about the issue, and its all a good read. Heres some of the best.

bobtheheadless (467304)
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video… hm.

Sanity (1431)
I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.

IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg – all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.

All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.

Oh, BTW – I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess – I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.

JohnGrahamCumming (684871) comments about the website,
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information

I personally think its all good fun but the genres are too wide for any good experience. Also I expected it to generate tones for human listening? Some of it was hardly that. I would like to see it take only a single genre and use the same engine then hear the results.

No matter what the slashdotters say, the author page sounds like he has lots of interesting projects going on, but not much to show at this moment. Some of the papers I will have to read through when I got the time.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io