automated mashups

Tired:  making mashups with Acid.  Wired: mashups built through machine learning.

It's only a matter of time until someone builds a system to build mashups automatically.  First, a bot will crawl the web for popular music.  Those samples will be fed into algorithms that compare beats per second, chord progressions, sonic profile and emotional tone, in order to score potential mashup matches.  Each mashup candidate will then be fed through psychographically profiled sales data of its component songs to determine the optimal marketing impact of the mashup.  Mashup "assignments" will then be fed to a distributed set of automated mashup makers, each programmatically tuned with different mashup style rulesets.  Once the mashup is completed, it will be fed to an automated mashup distributor, which is responsible for seeding the file in various corners of the net, and tracking download and distribution activity.  That data will then be used by to determine further marketing spend and potential "mass media" distribution strategies.

In the future, music won't be made.  It will be grown.

Comments

[harold]

dude. someone has too much free time to think... Isn't Mena keeping you busy?

[mattw]

Birdsong.

[michael]

matt, yes! birdsong. exactly.

[Allen]

Ugh.

[Caterina Fake]

I don't know. All the electronically created music that I've ever heard has sounded inorganic and unmoving.

I'm thinking of that essay in Hofstadter of the mathematics in the Etudes of Chopin and how the pieces seem surprising and yet at the same time inevitable in retrospect -- and that surprise, that necessariness, that inevitability is where genius lies and is essentially unreproduceable by mechanical means. He talks about this in all of those essays in Metamagical Themas, which, of course I haven't read for years.

Of course, I hate mashups, and probably for the same reason. Individual artists, or bands, develop their own character and language incommensurate with other artists and bands and it is what is idiosyncratic to each is what is vital, and necessary. Mashups seem as if they belong in a category with things like cover bands or Weird Al Yankovic parody songs: amusing and curious, but ultimately lacking the spark of individual genius.

[Dick Costolo]

"In the future, music will be grown". Whoa. Are you applying to the Kurzweil institute for hyperbole? Here's my application: "In the future, oranges will bark."

[Neville]

Deep blue beat Kasparov back in '97, mashup alogo-rhythms are just around the corner.

[lostgallifreyan]

Nice. :) I was googling for stuff to give me an idea of what a mashup was, and this page was the single best, and funniest source of info I found. Keep it up. :)

[Mark Simmons]

Has this been created yet? Seems like a songbirdpandora product.