
Is the Future of Music a Chip in Your Brain? - jonbaer
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-future-of-music-a-chip-in-your-brain-1449505111
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chadgeidel
I'd believe this if we had a music service today with a "recommendation
engine" that was worth anything. IMHO it's a complete crapshoot on all the
ones I've used. I still think Pandora's is "best" but that's because it's
actually recommended music I haven't heard. Most recommendations are of the
form "you liked song A from band Y - try song B from band Y".

As an aside - this feels like a "submarine" post
([http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)).
I can't tell what they are selling though.

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mej10
Spotify's Discover Weekly has been really good -- for n = 7.

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chadgeidel
Hmm, I listened to it for a few weeks and it was basically the same playlist
every Monday. I'll pick it up again - thanks for the recommendation.

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wwweston
So there's several different questions here:

* whether machines will be capable of composing some kind of appealing music. This is already possible, and likely to get better/broader.

* whether machines will get so good at this (on demand, no less) they will crowd out contributions that are largely human-crafted. This seems uncertain to me, maybe more likely at the commodity and conceptual ends of the market, maybe less so in craft-niches.

* whether music is really a _personal_ experience or a social one -- or, since it's obviously both, to what degree people want both things when.

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TranquilMarmot
You go to a concert and rather than listening to a live band, it just plays
the same song in everybody's head really, really loud so that you can't hear
anyone talk.

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dstyrb
Silent Disco?

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mojuba
Been thinking about something else: stream music that's playing in your head
now, so that others can hear it. No AI, no "adaptive" crap, just what's being
composed in your mind right now. Whether this is typical or not I'm not sure,
but I almost always have some music playing in my head, which I can't always
transform into a track, as I'm just a hobbyist music maker, not a pro.

If I were rich I'd establish a big fat prize for this technology, seriously.

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nemo1618
I imagine that would be quite difficult. As far as I'm aware, we currently do
not know if your brain is doing the same thing as mine when we hear songs in
our respective heads. So first you have the problem of extracting the
information. But then you have the potentially bigger problem of _translating_
the information!

We can be fairly sure that when you hear music in your head, nothing is
actually vibrating in your head to produce the sound. My guess is that you
have a bank of "instrument memories" and "note memories," and you can imagine
new music by smashing a note memory into an instrument memory. (Similarly, try
to imagine President Obama saying "My fellow Americans: even electronic brain
pancake crystal elderly." It's surprisingly easy to combine your memories of
his voice with your bank of known words.) But what guarantee is there that my
instrument memories are the same as yours, or that they are stored in the same
way? The mapping is not clear.

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egypturnash
If your "instrument/note memories" thesis is correct, then it's not too hard
to imagine that Brainr _' s initial setup would involve a calibration process
to work out what _your* particular mapping of sound memories is shaped like.

* to give this putative "plays the music in your head" app a terrible name

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hotgoldminer
Makes me think about:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_hallucinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_hallucinations)

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intopieces
I wonder what actually qualifies as a musical hallucination? I listen to some
fairly experimental music. I often hear sounds that remind me of that music,
to the point that I perceive those sounds as music themselves. John Cage
taught me this.

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zimbatm
Want to remember a nice song ? Thanks to DRM 5.0 implants only licensed
persons will be humming away. In release 6.0 non-licensed songs will also be
cut from the audio feed automatically.

Haaaapy b.. what, how did that go again ?

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imtringued
Not to mention that this could be quite an effective torture device which
makes the entire idea horrifying.

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desireco42
I was thinking quite a bit about this recently and it is closer than many
think. Already techno, ambient music is made almost automatically.

To help you understand, there are two ways, one is using so called 'expert
systems', this is computer algorithms guided by humans, and other would be
artificial intelligence, where computers completely generate music on their
own.

For the most part, ES is done today and works well, AI can be done for ambient
music. Once we plug our feedback, how we feel and what kind of music we would
like to listen to, that is when things will get really interesting.

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verklarte
Any examples of techno/ambient generated by ES? I knew the ES had a big uptick
in popularity in the 90s but I wasn't aware that people were still actively
using it for things other than customer-service and similar question-asking
interfaces.

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TheOtherHobbes
Some of the stuff on Warp is computer-assisted - in fact it has been for a
long time. But we're really only talking about semi-random loop cut-ups and
effects sequencing.

Ableton has a small suite of algo-comp packs. And there are things like
WaveDNA's Liquid Music.

I'm not aware of anyone making complete commercial tracks using ES - at least,
not with a high profile career. (I suspect Bjork does a bit of this, but I'm
not sure how much. Holly Herndon certainly does, but isn't very mainstream.)

Strange fact: people have been attempting algo-comp for decades, and it
remains incredibly obscure and ignored, even though there have been literally
hundreds of languages, toolkits, and frameworks. That's partly because most of
it isn't very musical - at best it sounds like a random mash-up of music
slices with no overall sense of form or mood, and at worst it sounds like
musical nonsense.

It could also be because successful systems become so complicated they're only
really useful to one composer. No one else has the time or the patience to
learn them.

But more, musicians seem to have a block about the idea - e.g. WaveDNA have
literally had a lot of hate for LiquidMusic.

Even though many genres are very formulaic, abstracting those formulas in a
useable way turns out to be very hard, especially if you're aiming for a
definite mood instead of a random musical squiggle. Most people who make music
would rather do it by hand than have a computer do it for them.

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matco11
Funny that today's TechCrunch Disrupt winner is an AI service for music
generation [http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/jukedeck-wins-disrupt-
londo...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/jukedeck-wins-disrupt-london-2015/)

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mirimir
Music and cognitive enhancement are both cool. But I can't imagine "DJ in my
head" as a key driver. Automation of learning stuff seems far more useful.

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jqm
Music Schmusic. I'm waiting for the advertisements.

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nikdaheratik
I'm reminded of the rule about headlines with a question mark at the end: the
answer is always "No".

