Tagging in i-tunes on a rainy night

I bet you all know an iTunes hater.

You know these guys, the ones who poo-poo anything even remotely popular. These are the same people that use Linux instead of Windows and bring their own Sake to catered parties.

They probably use something like Media Monkey and are the very same ones that turn renegade on you in online games. They have the morals of an alley rat (cat is too good for them) and frankly they smell a bit too.

SoiTunes gets its criticism yes. Sometimes it is justified (this Genius obviously has never heard of classical or roots music before) but most of the issues you may come across usually have a solution if you just look hard enough. Lifehacker is one such site I would recommend for those wanting to learn more about making the most out of the application.

It was in that very site that I came across some great information regarding tagging. Now I just love this idea so much I had to share. I love that I can drill down to a song and associate all kinds of descriptive tidbits about it. Perhaps this appeals to a certain type of individual; one who likes labels. Or maybe those who like to consider the future.

I recently heard that this is a good signpost for marking intelligence. Those who consider possible future uses is the benchmark for our species evolution. Way back around 40,000 years ago when the Neandertals were still kicking around alongside our ancestors; it is believed that your dear old great great great …. well you get the idea…… grandparents began storing water by burying it in the shade of a tree in large ostrich eggs. This was to ensure there was water available when they came back that way. This is what distinguished us from our slack jawed cousins the Neandertals. We developed the skill of imagination and it is why we are here now with such bloody big brains. We won, go us.

This leads us thousands of years back to the future and we can see millions of examples of future planning; most of the time it’s the most boring topic imaginable. But tagging is definitely not my friends. Tagging is the emancipator from your staid and limited musical tastes. And here is where I round up this blog beautifully by finally making my point.

iTunes does not have a specific tagging option however you simply have to use the Comments field to add them. For example with a song like 'I love a rainy night' by Eddie Rabbit I would possibly use the following tags - Weather, rain, night, love, bad 80's music, OR with my collection of Mojo and Uncut magazine CD's is add the tags - magazine, uncut (or) mojo, etc

What this means is that once you start amassing enough tagged music you can begin to use the playlist option in i-tunes with some aplomb and panache. Forget the boring old 'Year of release' or 'Genre' or 'Least played' or 'Most recently added' playlists. By using tags you can create the most fascinating mixes by connecting music with a subject or theme such as 'Magazine' or 'Weather'. When I did this the resulting mix of music was a revelation. Rock,jazz, alternative, roots, reggae, world from any time all played beautifully together. It is almost like giving people a free pass to enjoy music they would normally not listen to. All you need to do is select Random and as long as you have enough music you can keep updating the random option and here new music for the same tag. I tell you it’s the bees knees.

My personal favourites so far have been 'The word blue', 'Seasons' and 'Bob Dylan' added with 'Bob Dylan covers'. Have a try yourself and come back to tell us your favourite tagged playlists.

And finally, as we roll into another Australian summer scorcher (hey that’s a great idea for a playlist, Australian songs with the word summer), don’t think that we at SOI are not doing our part. Water restrictions are on their way so to combat this disaster we offer to the gods a rain song to appease their cruel and jealous ways.

The Psychology of Music Preferences

Apple has just released a version of iTunes with a new feature called Genius. Genius makes custom playlists (of either music you own or music you might want to by) based on a secret algorithm. If you opt-in, iTunes sends all of your listening history data (e.g., track names, artist names, playcounts, skipcounts) to a central server. The algorithm then looks for patterns in worldwide listening trends. To use Genius you right-click a particular song, choose 'start Genius', and BANG you've got a list of 'similar' songs. I'm loving it. It's helped me rediscover some music that Dan had given me but that I hadn't listened to much.

This got me thinking about how one might statistically look for trends in music preferences. I wondered if there'd ever been a factor analysis of music preferences. A factor analysis is a statical technique for finding trends amongst different variables. It's often used in personality research. You ask a large sample of volunteers a whole stack of questions (e.g., "On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you like parties?", "How much do you like being the center of attention?" etc.) and look for shared variance in the responses. I've written about factor analyses of personality related data before here.

Anyway, a quick literature search turned up this article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Rentfrow, P.J., Gosling, S.D. (2003). The Do Re Mi’s of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 136-1256.

Among the studies reported is a factor analytic study of music preferences. 1,704 students from the University of Texas were asked to rate each of 14 music genres on a scale from 1 ('I don't like it at all') to 7 ('I like it a great deal'). The genres were: alternative, blues, classical, country, electronica/dance, folk, heavy metal, rap/hip-hop, jazz, pop, religious, rock, soul/funk, and sound tracks.

The analysis revealed 4 main dimensions (factors) that captured 59% of the total variance. The names given to these factors and the genres associated with them are as follows:

- Reflective and complex (blues, jazz, classical, and folk)
- Intense and rebellious (rock, alternative, heavy metal)
- Upbeat and Conventional (country, sound track, religious, and pop)
- Energetic and Rhytmic (rap/hip-hop, soul/funk, and electronica/dance)

These dimensions are reasonably independent of each other (1). People who like reflective and complex music are just as likely to enjoy intense and rebellious music as they are to not. What these factors mean is that if someone likes a genre related to a particular dimension (e.g., blues) then they'll probably also like the other genres on that dimension (e.g., jazz). The same goes for disliking a genre.

One limitation of this study is that peoples' understanding of genre terms may vary. I might think that I don't like folk music and yet like many songs that others would categorise as folk. It would be great to see an analysis done on song by song ratings, rather than just genres.

Another analysis, which was really interesting, involved looking for relationships between e musical preferences and differences in personality and cognitive ability. They found all sorts of relationships, although most of them were quite small (.2ish). The largest one (.4ish) was between a preference for Reflective and Complex music and the personality characteristic Openness to Experience. Interestingly, there was a small (.2ish) relationship between verbal IQ and liking of Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, or Upbeat and Conventional music (2).

Very interesting stuff.

I'd love to see these researchers team up with Apple and analyse the iTunes Genius data.

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(1) Upbeat and Conventional and Energetic and Rythmic correlate .5 if allowed to covary.

(2) And no, I don't think this is evidence that music makes you smarter (can you guess why?).

Ray Lamontagne new song

I just happened across an upcoming track from Ray Lamontagne's new album out soon called 'Gossip in the grain'. I was responding to somebody over at Aaron Darc's site about a comment Tina Arena made regarding big voiced singers being out of vogue. I wanted to use Ray as an example of someone who understands when to use the big voice and when to use a more subtle approach.

His new song provides us this as an illustration. It is another beautiful song. He is in my humble opinion on of our generations greatest singer/songwriters.

Mark Kozelek - the sad life of the troubadour

Last week I finally had the opportunity to go see one of my favourite songwriters, Mark Kozelek. He now records under the name Sun Kil Moon.

It was a paired down tour with only Mark (Kozelek, not this blogs Mark) and an accompanist also on guitar.

Now this is not going to be a review on the show, I will leave that to the music blogs out there. Instead I want to talk about the sad life of the troubadour.

Years back I attended a music college to study classical guitar. It was not something I was passionate about at all. Rather my parents decided that if I was going to choose music as a career I should do something reputable. This coming from two people who trod the Melbourne pub scene for years. I guess they didn't want me to end up working my backside off for so little gain. It is after all a very difficult life.

Suffice to say I did not last long there. For me it was about songwriting rather than becoming a great musician. I guess this is something they just didn't get. Neither of my parents were big songwriters and the band played mostly covers.

But the thing was I was not a natural performer either. In fact I had terrible stage fright, and still do although I have found ways of dealing with it.

And it is this capacity to cope that brings me to the point of this post. There have been a number of occasions in which I have gone to a gig knowing in advance that the performer is extremely shy. It was interesting then to see how they cope with this on stage. Would it effect their performance or would it be the one place in the world they felt comfortable. I have seen examples of both. But what about all the hours preceding the nights gig? How does a shy person manage the endless touring, interviews and fans?

In the case of Mark Kozelek, it was clear that he was not coping at all with his public.

On the second night (yes I am a freak and went twice) I waited around after the show to see if I could get to meet this fascinating songwriter and maybe get a CD signed. It was with great regret that I got my wish. A mere 5 minutes after the encore, with the crowd now thinned, Mark came wandering out. My sister and I wandered over to wait nearby as Mark signed someone's CD. He then turned to us and it was then that my heart just sank. Whatever he took backstage had worked very quickly. Far from the gregarious funny performer we saw on stage; we had before us a confused, shy and paranoid man who could barely see through his sunken eyelids.

The conversation was quipped, confused and teeth grindingly uncomfortable. Frankly I have done everything I can to forget the incident so I don't lose that feeling I get listening to his music.

Why do these people do what appears so uncomfortable to them? Why make a career that demands from then what they cannot deliver? Here is what Kozelek said in a recent interview about meeting his public-

"You find yourself acting strange. Sometimes when I’m on stage and I start rambling about my personal life or spilling my guts to some weird fan that’s gonna post what you said online in half an hour… it’s a weird world, a whole different thing. Being in that world where people are obsessed with you is strange, idiosyncratic and exclusive."

And perhaps even more telling, this quote -

"Sometimes, even though you’re out there playing for 500 or 1000 people, so for two hours you sort of have the world in your hands, but in a second those people are out the door, on trains. And I’m backstage with the club guy, who really just wants you to get the fuck out of there because he has to do the same thing tomorrow night, and all of a sudden you’re in a cab and in a hotel room, jet lagged, fucking lonely as hell, and you can’t call anyone ‘cause it’s fucking expensive and it’s some weird hour somewhere else."

Its a tough industry. And from what I have heard from some inside sources it appears drugs are offered to these guys regularly, even by the record companies themselves. I think even the most together artist must give in at some stage. Travelling so much of the year it is hard to keep yourself grounded. Perhaps this is what my parents saw for my future and hoped for something better.

Have you heard any stories of artists who have just not coped with touring? Send us your comments.

Bill Henson and Art Monthly Australia - bully for them

SPECIAL NOTE. This post contains an exclusive interview with Blogging Royalty 'The Eye'.

It is not often that a piece of art has the kind of impact that sees it transcend the subject matter itself, and become so much more. Art can in these cases lead to some pretty big questions being asked and some very heated debates. It can make us question how far freedom of expression is allowed and whether an artist needs to enforce some kind of self regulation. It also makes us as a society ask ourselves what kind of responsibility we have when art has crossed some kind of perceived moral line in the sand. It is a rare thing indeed when one of the so called respectable arts can make this kind of front page impact. That sort of attention is usually left to the more mainstream artists. "Which pop singer has had another drug induced meltdown?" "Which socialite has released a follow-up homemade porn video? More at 6."

In the case of Bill Henson’s latest exhibition, it is the repercussions for the subject matter herself that leave us at SOI to wonder who was there to consider her safety?

About a month ago a series of artist Bill Henson photographs depicting a nude underage girl sparked an emotional national debate about censorship and the sexualisation of children. In fact when news of the exhibition broke, the gallery displaying the work was inundated with angry calls, some threatening to burn down the building. Child exploitation is a highly emotional subject and one that has recently been on the radar for a number of reasons. The timing could not have been worse for Henson given the recent outrage over a Myley Cyruss topless shots (the 15-year-old star of Disney hit TV show Hannah Montana ) and more recently the mass arrests over child pornography. And now we have a brand new controversy just making news over the retaliatory shots of a six year old girl on the cover of a petulant Art Monthly Australia in what is essentially the printed version of poking your tongue out. What makes it even worse is that these shots are just plain crap.

Recently we have seen the NSW police abandon their questionable case against the artist, I doubt many people truly believed that Henson’s intention was to create child pornography. Nor do many view the work as pornography, but is this really the point?

To our way of thinking the bigger issue comes down to the manipulation of the child involved rather than the fear of less savoury individuals viewing these images for purposes far from innocent. The fact is these people will pick up a Target catalogue and see something vastly different than what was intended. Our issue with all this comes down to something far more practical.

It turns out that the girl in the photos parents are friends of Henson. It was while at a dinner party together that he brought up the possibility of using their daughter as a model. Now you can see just how enticing this would be to the parents involved. It is likely that they are not artists themselves so the idea of having their daughter immortalised by one of Australia’s leading photographers would be absolutely thrilling. I can see the excitement in their faces as they clink champagne glasses to seal the deal.

I would suggest at this point that many of us are now wondering how much time was actually spent discussing the possible down side of this venture. The biggest question that comes to mind is what happens when the other kids from her school discover (which indeed they now have) that they are now the proud owners of nude pictures of their school chum. It doesn’t take a vast stretch of the imagination to work out what the other kids at school will do to her. One word springs to mind – bullying.

Art is at its heart subjective and the intent of an artist can get lost or even ignored. Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov experienced a shocking lesson in this very thing when he opened the front door at Halloween to find two girls dressed as his nymphet creation asking for candy. So you can just imagine what sort of things these kids, who lets face it, can be horribly cruel will say about these images. All discussion of artistic merit and the beauty of innocence is completely and utterly mute here.

Forget pornography, forget the perverts, forget artistic merit, forget censorship. If the parents of this girl can tell me that the children she goes to school with have not teased, taunted and bullied her in any way; if this does not taint her reputation in that school for years to come. Then I will apologise.

I ask again, is ANYONE let alone the parents considering this outcome? I just wonder how smug they are going to feel when she comes home from school one day and runs crying into their arms.


Mark's $0.02

Hi, Mark here.

Look, for me this issue is really simple. It's not about the definition of pornography, it's not about censorship, it's just about consent. Consent, consent, consent. Kids can't make this kind of decision for themselves, and given that it's conceivable that a child may regret it in the future, why should a parent consent on behalf of their child? And for that matter why should an artist accept that consent?

It wouldn't pass the ethics committee at my university.

I think a big problem with this debate is that people confuse morals with ethics, a topic which i will post on in the future. - Mark

And now our exclusive interview with The Eye.

We chat with the creator of 'Eye On Big Brother' fame. This year his informative posts on Australian Big Brother '08 have really struck a chord with people. Listen to this interview and you will understand why. This is one smart fella. Dont forget to go check out his site here.

Here is the interview -henson.mp3

Dont forget to subscribe to this blog (top right of page) as we hope The Eye will return soon.

Musical Terrorism - Nobody is safe

Mark and I have decided to take our relationship to the next level. That's right, we are sharing our iTunes playlists. A big step granted, but an important one to keep the blog fires burning.

We are using a spunky little program called Mojo which enables us to download tracks across a local network or the Internet. The only downside to this is that it eats away our upload allowance if you get charged for going both ways (just count the double entendres).

Here comes the disturbing twist to the tale. Upon gaining access to Marks musique ensemble d'objets I discovered an interesting pattern. None of his playlists were just of a single album. Instead there abound playlist after playlist of jumbled mixes based on complex strings of filtered madness. Looking in the edit section of just one and I started getting dizzy. I felt like I was in a scene from The Cube.

Where was his Artist or Album playlists? I couldn't take it in. My head was swimming. Where was his Radiohead only playlist? Where was Pet Sounds, Music From Big Pink, Revolver? There appeared no band loyalty whatsoever. Rather the lists focused on randomness and file sizes and least played.

He uses the so called 'Smart' playlist option in iTunes to create these acts of musical terrorism. I say terrorism because that's what it is. He and the rest of his fickle generation of musical Pol Pots are destroying the Album as we know it every time they unleash on of these little mixed menaces onto the online community.

Well enough is enough. Its time for other like minded album lovers to rise up and be counted. I propose an army of iPod Police; making random playlist searches and giving on the spot fines for anyone taking the concept too far.

Further to this I propose a three strikes and your out rule; followed by intense rehabilitation. I'm thinking solitary confinement rooms filled with bean bags, gigantic headphones, a turntable and a couple of milk crates filled with Rolling Stone magazines 'Top 100 Rock albums of all time'.


All that is necessary for the perpetuation of pernicious playlists is if good people do nothing.

I bless you in the name of the Godfather, the Sun-Kil-Moon and the Spirit of the rock and roll.