I fondly recall the Google Reader days when lots of folks were reading long form content. With the demise of Google Reader, and the rise of Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, long form content drifted into the background. But it may be coming back, thanks at least in part, to Substack. I’m going to give Substack a try, so you’ll find new content posted at musicmachinery.substack.com ..read more

I’ve been reading blogs seemingly forever. I’ve read lots of great posts .. but there’s one blog post that I still think about all the time even though it is nearly 5 years old. It’s by Sascha Judd and its all boy bands and the diversity crisis in tech. It’s a must read: How The Tech Sector Could Move In One Direction. The gendered aspect of it kept bugging me.  It seemed like it was okay to be hysterical about some things, but not others. Someday I may get back to organizing tech events – and when I do, I’ll be thinking about better ways to engage with fan armies ..read more

A few months ago, we finally shutdown the final remnants of the old Echo Nest infrastructure. One of casualties of this final shutdown was the archive of my old blog Duke Listens! that I authored while I was a researcher at Sun Labs. However, I did manage to have a backup sitting on an old backblaze disk, so this morning I took a bit of time to re-host it on one of my personal servers. You can find it at: http://dukelistens.playlistmachinery.com/ The blog serves as a reminder of the history of music recommendation and discovery during the iPhone era. Some notable posts: My first MIR-related p ..read more

Today Amazon released AWS DeepComposer which is a keyboard that will let you “create a melody that will transform into a completely original song in seconds”. To me it looks like an Arturia Keystep knock-off.  I’m still puzzling over whether or not there’s any special ML-related features – or is it just a MIDI keyboard that comes with some AWS credits. Anyone with any insights, please let me know ..read more

I’ve spent the last 15 or so years thinking mostly about the machinery that gets music from the bits in an audio recording into the ears of a listener. There are dozens of examples of tools for music discovery, organization and listening in the sidebar at the right on this blog.  But lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the machinery that goes into getting the bits into an audio recording in the first place.  I’m particularly interested in two aspects of this:  (1) music synthesis – the machinery that can create the sounds from scratch and (2) generative music – machinery that can ..read more

Woah, its been a while since I’ve posted to this blog (three and a half years to be exact).  I think it’s time for a bit of a reboot on this blog.  Stay tuned ..read more