Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/can-an-ai-determine-if-a-song.html
…
Sure, but they only have one set of dance moves for every song.
AI don’t dance, and if it don’t dance, it ain’t no friend of mine.
Can an AI determine if a song is danceable?
The universal law is that everything is danceable, you just require the desire to make it so.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The Rocksteady Crew’s “Hey You” is playing in the background. The tortoise lays on its back, trying to launch into a backspin, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
The “fascinating” question has an easy answer. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a vision of the future, imagine Clippy popping up every time you do anything, forever.
No argument against that, although I think there are certain beats that seem to generally motivate rhythmic movement, and seemingly outside of conscious choice. Perhaps not evidence of that, I recall videos of cockatoos and other birds dancing to music that had (to my ears) pretty good beats. And then there’s the time my mom was on the phone and, with her free arm, holding up my 18 month old niece by around her waist. I had music going and my niece was swaying one leg back and forth in sync with the beat. Hmm. As an experiment, I reached over a few times to stop her leg from swaying, and each time she picked up the beat again! (The sly look on her face had me in stitches!)
The idea that this can be put into a single scale is very engineer-like. Songs become danceable with the right context
I have witnessed folks dancing to a didgeridoo accompanied by a woman screaming. ok, it was “performance art” (and a one-off date (she dumped me (and it was her own sister in the dance troupe)))
Or the chemistry.
Well if there is a decision tree it uses, the first question should be “did Fatboy Slim Remix it?”
No, but I can.
The answer is “no”.
I’m dancing right now.
We’re basically already there.
It’s just that the “AI” equivalent of Clippy doesn’t pop up as such, but does whatever it does in a stealthy black box mode. Undisclosed, opaque, unaccountable. Oh, and more likely than not, biased.
Nobody puts Baby AI in a corner.
I’m not even sure if I can determine if a song is danceable.
(Cue mazurka music.)
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed .
Thinking the machine simply didn’t hear him, Gerst repeats his instruction: “Cancel music.”
But CIMON was having none of it. “I love music you can dance to,” the robot says, sounding a bit defensive. “Alright, favorite hits incoming.”
One of Bill’s best parodies, I reckon.