pandora re-opened

As a follow-up to a previous post I found this Inside The Net podcast on the Pandora music recommendation system. In the interview Tim Westergren, from Pandora, gives a few facts and figures on the system:

• There are 400 aspects in their taxonomy. And, for example, the vocal aspect includes the amount of vibrato, the vocal range and the "twiddlyness" (my words).
• To categorise music they employ people with music degrees and provide 40 hours of training on the taxonomy.
• It takes between 20 and 30 minutes to describe a song.
• They add 7000-8000 songs per month and, in total, describe around 15000 artists with 100,000s songs. In contrast there are typically 50,000 new albums per year in the US.

He thinks that playlists are what music is all about now and comments on how the most popular recommender systems up to now have tended to use collaborative filtering (e.g. other people that like this also like...). The flaws with this are that you can be stuck with bad choices from the past (or choices by your partner or presents or whatever) and that it is generally a popularity contest and is therefore not good at recommending unknown artists. Obviously Pandora has the same problem because they can only rate a limited amount of content though Tim mentions that they employ a couple of people who look for new bands to include - maybe in the future you won't need a record deal, just a playlist deal.

this christmas...

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The reminiscences of a woman who was at boarding school in the English countryside in the '70s. As the book progresses it transpires that this is set in some alternative reality and it's not an ordinary school.

I listened to Girls Aloud - Chemistry and John Adams - Shaker Loops. Chemistry got a 5 star review from the Guardian and I love the production in it, particularly that slowly building filtered bass in Biology. And I like a bit of classical minimalism hence Shaker Loops.

I watched King Kong. It's true, once the expedition to Skull Island starts the action doesn't stop. I'm not a fan of bog-standard Hollywood blockbusters but this was an enthralling 3 hours. But I had to suspend my disbelief about the woman/ape relationship, can there really be something in the eyes of a computer-generated 30ft tall simian? And was she really torn between the writer and the enormous ape? Realistic simulation of a ship in a storm which, as my partner pointed out, did seem to have the right scale and movement. Massive recreation of New York in the 1930s and some seriously scary giant insects.

I went to see An Epitaph for George Dillon by John Osbourne. Seemed a bit like two plays, one light-hearted drama and one an angry rant against suburban life. The '50s living room setting was a bit depressing though - remember those special leather covers for the Radio Times?

I played Warhammer 40K - Dawn of War. Saw loads of family over Christmas and my cousin's son, about 12 years old, is into Warhammer 40K. This took me back 'cos at the same age I was so into my space marines. So I bought the PC game, Warhammer 40K to relive some of those times - haven't actually got around to playing it much though but looks great.