Music from our robot overlords

[resonant]

iTunes 8 has this function called Genius, which makes a customized playlist starting from a song you choose. Preliminary observations:

- Genius is inordinately fond of the Cowboy Junkies' "Misguided Angel," which shows up in about 50% of the playlists it generates.



- About half of my music is stuff Genius can't recognize. Celtic, folk, Revels records, African pop, Mexican baroque, bluegrass/roots music. Which is a shame, because that part is the part I'd most like to see playlists from.

- I'd love to know how it works, because clearly it's not just matching genre and period. It makes suggestions that are eccentric and yet weirdly appropriate. A playlist based on the Specials' "A Message For You, Rudy," gets a fair bit of ska-influenced '80s music, as you would predict, but it also goes backward to pick up the Who's "Substitute" and forward to grab the Killers' "I Predict A Riot" and the Arctic Monkeys' "Fake Tales of San Francisco." One based on the Magnetic Fields' "Time Enough For Rocking When We're Old" grabs a lot of stuff from the place where alternative meets singer-songwriter, but also picks up Chad and Jeremy's "A Summer Song," Fleetwood Mac's "Never Going Back Again," and Bruce Springsteen's version of the traditional "O Mary Don't You Weep."

- The "we suggest you buy these songs from the iTunes music store" function is much less useful than the "we've dredged these songs up from the depths of your music collection" function. I made a playlist based on Dan Bern's "Jane," and Genius suggested that I buy ... five more songs by Dan Bern, plus five more songs with "Jane" in the title.

- It's really kind of frightening how much incredibly cheesy music I own. I will maintain to my death that Three Dog Night's "Shambhala" is a good song, but a playlist based on it is like turning over a rock. Who knew I owned E.L.O.'s "Don't Bring Me Down" or America's "Sister Golden Hair"?

Here, have a playlist; this is generated from Tim O'Brien's "Bow Down," from a collection based on Cold Mountain.

Tim O'Brien, Dirk Powell, and John Herrmann: Bow Down
Nickel Creek: When In Rome
Tony Rice and Ricky Skaggs: Mansions For Me
Asleep At the Wheel: Choo Choo Ch'Boogie
Hank Williams: Window Shoppin'
Dolly Parton: Marry Me
Lyle Lovett: If I Had A Boat
Vince Gill: One More Last Chance
Randy Travis: Deeper Than the Holler
David Allan Coe: You Never Even Called Me By My Name
Sammy Kershaw: She Don't Know She's Beautiful
Tim and Mollie O'Brien: Don't Let Me Come Home A Stranger
Nanci Griffith: Last Of The True Believers
Tim O'Brien, Dirk Powell, and John Herrmann: Backstep Cindy
Johnny Cash: Folsom Prison Blues
Shania Twain: Whose Bed
Tony Rice and Ricky Skaggs: Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies
Roger Miller: King of the Road
Tim O'Brien: Man Gave Names To All The Animals
Hank Williams: Cold, Cold Heart
Glenn Campbell: Galveston
Bill Monroe: Uncle Pen
Brooks & Dunn: Brand New Man
Patty Loveless: Blame It On Your Heart
Patty Loveless: Rise Up, Lazarus

Comments

[qe2.livejournal.com]

OOOOOH. You!music. There is no possible lose here.

Also: Revels = Cambridge [MA] Revels?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hm, finding lots of long-neglected comments in my e-mailbox -- sorry -- you may not even care any more -- I have a whole bunch of Revels CDs, and I think some of them are the Cambridge group and others are regional groups.

Someone I know on LJ has actually sung in a Revels choir -- is that you? I am so envious of whoever it is.

[qe2.livejournal.com]

I'm just impressed that you reply to comments even when they're a bit old. You're a better person than I!

I know too little about the Revels tradition to be aware of whether the regional ones are offshoots of the Cambridge one (or it of them, I suppose) or whether they derive independently from a UK tradition thereof. Do you know?

Sadly, it's not I who've sung in a Revels choir, though I'd love to have done so and perhaps will audition for one when next I'm near enough. The first time I lived in Boston, almost twenty years ago (...omgwtfyikes), I didn't have anything like enough courage to audition for the Cambridge Revels. The second time I lived there, before I went to law school, I was trying to make as much of my living as a singer as I could, and that interfered badly with my ability to make time for nifty stuff like the Revels that took a lot of time and didn't pay. There are some good things about no longer being a professional musician.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Wow, I didn't even realize you'd been a musician! What kind of singing did you do? I'd never thought of it, but I can see where if you do something professionally, you don't also get to do it the way an amateur does it.

[qe2.livejournal.com]

Yep - though apologies for mentioning it that way, as it must have sounded a bit like I was preening my feathers :-s. I was a professional singer for about a decade, though I never earned more than half my living that way. The last three or so years of it I was a fulltime freelancer, copyediting and proofreading to pay the bills singing everywhere I could didn't cover. As for what I sang: anything anyone would hire me to sing :-). Mostly classical, for a value thereof that ranged from Medieval to twentieth century, and mostly choral/ensemble, which I loved. There is nothing in this world like being one of a small, true-voiced, spot-on choir making actual, honest-to-God, effortless-seeming, bone-deep music. ...okay, so: although I've gotten past a lot of my grief at no longer being a singer, some days I still miss it like oxygen.

Anyway. As a pro, I sang whatever I could get someone to hire me to sing. English choral music, weddings and funerals, American tunes from the Colonial period, plainsong, vocal jazz; tenor, boy soprano, the mezzo I really was. I enjoyed it - I've always been a journeyman performer at heart, rather than the soloist specialist type - but it alchemized singing for me in some odd ways. Avocation to profession: not a bump-free road.

also:

[qe2.livejournal.com]

hah, you have just solved a mystery for me: I had your Bow Down playlist on my hard drive, and was thoroughly enjoying it, but I could not for the LIFE of me remember where I'd gotten it and was having no joy finding the answer to that question via Uncle Google. Yay, once again, for you-music.