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.
Amazon web services has just launched 
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