adaptive, distributed jukebox

By anders pearson 10 Mar 2002

hanging out at the bar tonight with obert, julintip and her friends i had an interesting little idea.

<p>suppose everyone had a tiny portable electronic device on them that stored their musical preferences and had short range wireless capabilities. then, if you had a jukebox that could detect and talk to those devices, it could tailor its playlist to roughly match the musical tastes of the people in the immediate vicinity.</p>

<p>i think it would be really nice. sort of an automated, telepathic dj. you could extend the idea to other places that play music: bars, clubs, even replace the muzak in elevators. i think it would be great if i stepped into an elevator alone and the barry manilow that was playing was quickly replaced with some good, heavy industrial or something.</p>

<p>of course, the main problem with this idea is the chicken and egg problem. if no one has the devices, it wouldn&#8217;t make sense to have the jukeboxes around and vice versa. so i&#8217;d suggest initially putting the technology into cellphones.  enough people have cellphones already and always carry them with them that it would help bootstrap the system.</p>

<p>sprint (i think it&#8217;s sprint) has a service where you can hold your phone up to some music playing, dial the right number and it will tell you the artist and song that you&#8217;re listening to. if you combined this idea with a &#8220;i really like this song&#8221; and &#8220;i really don&#8217;t like this song&#8221; buttons on the phone, people could easily train it to their musical tastes. add in some data-mining like amazon uses to tell you that people who bought book X also frequently bought book Y and the system could train itself even better <em>and</em> alert you to new stuff that you might like by talking to the other devices it comes in contact with. if you&#8217;re in a room with someone who likes a lot of the same music as you, it could automatically add some of their preferences to your system.</p>

<p>you could also get CD players and various home stereo equipment that talk to your device and tell it that since you listen to a particular CD a lot, you probably like that album.</p>

<p>since i&#8217;m really into wearables and ubiquitous computing, i also think it would be need to add some contextual awareness. maybe if the device had a way to read your pulse/blood pressure/skin conductance/etc, it could tell what kind of mood you&#8217;re in and learn to associate particular groups of songs with particular moods. if you&#8217;re driving in your car, it could play good driving music for you; if you&#8217;re working on the computer, it could play whatever you like to listen to while you work; if you&#8217;re just chilling out and reading a book, it could play more mellow background sort of music.</p>

<p>probably not feasible at the moment but as cellphones and <span class="caps">PDA</span>s get smaller, more powerful, more widespread, and with more wireless capabilities, i think it could work quite nicely.</p>

<p>so if you like the idea, please desseminate it so that if in ten years, some company tries to patent the technology, there will be a lot of prior art to fight them with.</p> 

Tags: music technology adaptive