[tomc1985]

So... Pandora without all the song meta?

People make playlists for a variety of reasons, according to their specific tastes. Songs that appear together on a functional playlist (workout jams, study music, etc) likely won't have appeared together for the same (or even similar reasons). Contrast that even further against playlists built for aesthetic reasons ('sad songs', 'psychedelic-sounding', 'minimal', etc) and it seems hard to imagine how mining just playlists can lead to good music selections.

Is this algorithm attempting to track context or merely playlist contents?

And for the record, if there is one area that I really want machine learning and "AI" to fall flat on its face with, it's music. It's a shame technophiles want to strip the people out of art and its consumption.

[warpri81]

I suppose it is kind of like Pandora. We are actually mimicking word vectors (ala word2vec) but using playlists as the data set. So, in theory, it IS learning the context of songs to make some inferences about the songs themselves.

I absolutely agree that "AI" can't replace knowledgeable humans building thoughtful playlists. I started this project because I can't find new music quickly enough, and listening to any computer generated playlist/radio station gets stale fast. I also rarely find artists that I like more than a handful of their songs, so a lot of artist-centric recommendations miss the mark for me.

In a perfect world, we would feed in reams of carefully curated playlists, learn about different contexts songs appear in, and use some signals from the user to find the types of songs they want to listen to. Two songs don't make for a very strong signal - we have discussed trying to use the user's listening history to help refine the playlist.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

[visarga]

> And for the record, if there is one area that I really want machine learning and "AI" to fall flat on its face with, it's music. It's a shame technophiles want to strip the people out of art and its consumption.

Already advocating affirmative action for people in arts? That must mean a lot for "deep art" researchers.

[tomc1985]

How is that 'affirmative action'?

I simply want "deep art" to fail. Big difference. A world dominated by AI-generated art will coalesce us all into one or a handful of dull, lowest-common-denominator aesthetics and rob the world of aesthetic vitality. Not to mention all the artists, many of whom are already scraping for work, that get shut out as peoples' artistic pursuits are gratified instantly.

[epmaybe]

Why can't people be included in the mix (Human in the Loop/Interactive Machine Learning)? Is there no way for AI to aid people in art and consumption?