I absolutely loved the article about netflix and felt like sharing it with everyone I know that watches netflix. I do stand up comedy and the joke photos were so funny, it’s such good material to make jokes about….. but honestly the work done by the computer programs like AntCon and Alexis Madrigal was incredible. Regarding Netflix, I sometimes didn’t like how specific the altgenres get… for example, say you babysit a little kid and watch a show with them, for the next month you get suggestions for little kid TV shows…. which I always thought was kind of dumb. Sometimes I want to see things that are completely new to me. But I do understand their approach and I think it has been very successful for the most part. It especially creates the conditions for binge watching which is kind of an American epidemic.
Anyway, I was going to talk about how cool Pandora’s Music Genome Project is, but reading this article on Howstuffworks.com made me realize that I myself have been part of a metadata analysis group right here at UCLA.
I still would like to compare what I did, to the Pandora project and below is an except from HowStuffWorks:
“Pandora relies on a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics.It’s a project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. The Genome is based on an intricate analysis by actual humans (about 20 to 30 minutes per four-minute song) of the music of 10,000 artists from the past 100 years. The analysis of new music continues every day since Pandora’s online launch in August 2005. As of May 2006, the Genome’s music library contains 400,000 analyzed songs from 20,000 contemporary artists. ”
When I was living in the dorms my senior year I became a part of the Distinguished Palate Committee, and that pretty much meant I got to eat food for free at the dining halls and then rate dishes and the over all atmosphere of the dining halls. At the dining hall Feast, they specifically targeted students of Asian descent so they could make sure each dish retained it’s authenticity and the students were considered experts in their field, kind of like the experts in music theory mentioned in the quote above. They also had computers at the front of each restaurant where students got to rate dishes based on temperature, presentation, taste, etc. And because I worked as a taste tester I got to learn about how long it took them to develop the Bruin Plate menu and it actually took them years because of the balance they had to create between being healthy and also delicious.
I think the main thing to take away from all these articles and occurrences, is the illuminating understanding that it really takes a lot of work and data to make things such a song selection or plate of food look simple and easy.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/pandora.htm
