Genius is a hoot!

[dreamshark]

If you use iTunes on your computer, be sure to install the 8.0 upgrade and try the nutty new feature Genius.
You select a song in your iTunes library and start Genius, which instantly compiles a playlist of 25 "similar songs" from your library. I have no idea what it thinks it's doing, but the results are fun. What makes two songs "similar?" Damned if I know. I'm not sure what definition of "similar" could come up with not one but TWO songlists that include Gitarzen. But more times than not the songs do seem to go together in some indefinable fashion.

Here's the songlist that Genius compiled for me based on Jennifer Juniper. What do these songs have in common?


Jennifer Juniper - Donovan
Simple Twist Of Fate - Bob Dylan
Bitter Green - Gordon Lightfoot
Tom Dooley - Kingston Trio
This Flight Tonight - Joni Mitchell
Brokedown Palace - Grateful Dead
John Barleycorn - Traffic
The Obvious Child - Paul Simon
Cosmic Wheels - Donovan
Love Her Madly - The Doors
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again - Bob Dylan
Blue - The Jayhawks
The Letter - he Box Tops
Hesitation Blues - Hot Tuna
Bye Bye Love - The Everly Brothers
It's In The Way That You Use It - Eric Clapton
China Cat Sunflower - Grateful Dead
Under African Skies (Remastered Version) - Paul Simon
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues - Bob Dylan
The Dangling Conversation - Simon & Garfunkel
Crazy Game - Indigo Girls
Canadian Railroad Trilogy - Gordon Lightfoot
What The Soul Desires - Donovan
Story of Isaac - Leonard Cohen
The Last Time I Saw Richard - Joni Mitchell

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Most (but not all) of these fit loosely (very loosely) into that category of "60s music"; more a marketing category than any direct musical relationship.

Beyond that, I couldn't say. I'm not going to 8.0 yet until I've edited the interviews. Best not to change horses in midstream, and all that.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Most (but not all) of these fit loosely (very loosely) into that category of "60s music"

Given my music library, there really isn't a lot of choice as to era. :-)

I'd be interested to see what the results look like in a music library that is more eclectic. My taste in music is not very adventurous, to put it mildly.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I have music spanning literally 500 years (Antoine Brumel's Missa "Et ecce terra motus," from around 1500 C.E., up through a downloaded broadcast of Howard Shore's opera The Fly, which premiered in Paris a few weeks ago), and I got poor results as already mentioned ... so I can tell you that with regard to era, size doesn't matter!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Statistically, what they seem to have in common is that I haven't heard them. IN most cases I've heard of the band/artist, but I couldn't necessarily cite any particular work by them.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose that's a data point supporting whatever algorithm they used. You had no interest in the song I used as the seed, and it came up with a song list that continues that pattern perfectly.

Of course, if you've never even HEARD songs like "Tom Dooley," "Bye Bye Love" and "Brokedown Palace" our taste in music may be so divergent that no matter what kind of song list iTunes managed to construct from my music library it would leave you scratching your head.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Definitely know "John Barleycorn", "Brokedown Palace", "Dangling Conversation", and one other I don't remember and LJ has taken away the message I'm replying to so I can't go dig it up.

I may well have heard others in the sense of they were on the radio in some room I was in sometime; but if so I never learned enough to remember the name. But then I essentially never listen to music on the radio by intention; I'm nearly totally ignorant of pop music.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they got hold of the algorithm and supporting materials that Pandora used. I'm not familiar with all of those songs, but the ones I do know have similar musical, er, genes.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

iTunes attaches a field called "genre" to their songs, and it's pretty clear they are not clustering songs by similar entries in that field. In this sample song list, there are 6 different genres represented, plus two songs that have blank genre fields.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I understand that, but Pandora used to tag songs with particular characteristics derived from something called the Musical Genome Project, and depending on what bands you fed into it you could get some interesting stuff popping up based strictly on particular stylistic elements in the music. One of the Pandora "stations" I set up had music ranging from Roxy Music to Judas Priest.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

'Stylistic elements' - like time signature, key, use of particular instrumentation, etc?

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Among other things, yes.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

My friend gvdub suggested I try Genius, and as expected it did not perform well at all with classical music (http://asimovberlioz.livejournal.com/151566.html), at least with my particular library and with tags redone more to my liking.