Life in a tube
One of the great things about working on a project like 'Search inside the Music' is that I get to surround myself with music all day. I'm always listening to new music. For the last year I've been doing quite a bit of experimentation with music from Magnatune.
Magnatune offers an incredibly diverse music collection from heavy metal and punk to classical, ethnic and folk. Some of the songs, particularly by the band called the strap-ons, are well ... a bit edgy. They have one song called "this place sucks", which starts out with the singer screaming "this place sucks, it's f**ked". A little while back, I was giving a rather high profile demo of our music similarity and visualization system. One of the attendees was Jonathan Schwartz, the president of Sun Microsystems. During the demo, I get to show how we can use our visualization to explore our music collection by clicking around in a 3D visualization. It occured to me during this particular demo that it would be rather unfortunate if I happened to launch "this place sucks" ... I'm sure Jonathan has a good sense of humor but ... well you never know. Anyway, I did manage to avoid that song during the demo and it went quite well. By the way, here's the visualization (the album art here is for a band named pizzle)
One of my favorites of the Magnatune artists is Bjorn Fogelberg. His 'Karooshi porn' album is rhythmic, soft electronica, but with lots of solid analog synth sounds. His "Life in a tube" has become the unofficial theme song of the Advanced Search and the Search Inside the music research teams. Every team should have such a good theme song.
Posted by Jonathan Schwartz on February 19, 2006 at 12:51 PM EST #