Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

Pandora, everyone’s favorite music selection service recently put their genomic hooks deep into the Sonos music device. In doing so, Pandora has effectively removed their ability to predict and shape the habits of a music listener out of the computer and into a device, that for 1,000 dollars can transform your house into an augmentation of an intelligent music service.

Does this frighten anyone else?

I never really liked Pandora. I thought music too intrinsic, too core to the cognitive space between listener and performer to be quantified into something like a genome. The very fact that one could attempt to take music, and reduce it down into finite metrics in order to use algorithms to predict my habits seemed vulgar in a way. Unhealthy. Music was not quantified matrix’s and scales from 1 to 10, or ratings about how “earthy” a song was. It is Core, just like art, just like photography.

Then I tried the service, and was surprised. Over the course of a day, I listen to a lot of music. Call it a job hazard. I have a 500 watt amp hooked to two very nice speakers, pointed right at my head. Last week, when Pandora and Sonos announced their service, I decided to sign up for a year of Pandora. To start, I did what everyone would expect me to do:

I created and R.E.M. channel.

From there, I trained it, played with it, cursed the skipping rules (damn RIAA rules), and gradually grew more and more impressed. As the day went on, I was not skipping as much, and nearly forgot at times that I was in effect listening to the results of an algorithm that was attempting to placate my desire for music. Never did the right hand side of an equal sign sound so good though.

Then something interesting happened.

I went home, upgraded the Sonos, put in my Pandora account and pushed play.

And again, no skipping, some rating, pure music.

My outside brain had infected my home. Algorithms as predicates toward behavior are nothing new. Amazon.com uses algorithms as a means of predicting and dictating consumer behavior, and tangentially, that can drive the collective flock to maniuplate things as discrite as a specific genre of DVD’s (foreign documentaries about genocie), or something as general as pushing a CD from number 2 to number 1.

My brain, as it were, on Amazon is a well defined thing shaped over nearly ten years of buying history. Amazon knows me better than anyone in my life I think, as its duration exceeds those closest to me (my wife), and the habits it knows, far more personal and detailed than those of longer proximal duration (my family).

But Amazon was never a means of effecting the core essence of what I am. Amazon was means of augmentation of the presentation of Self, but never a means of direct manipulation of said Self. I trained Amazon through value exchange to know me better, and thus facilitate more consumer behavior in a manner that benefitted us both the most. We worked together, Amazon and I, for a better future. For both of us in fact.

Pandora on the other hand, is something wholly different. It traversed the boundaries of pure augmentation and into the realm of direct sensory perception.

And here is where I’m starting to have a little issue with it.

The concept of the Outside Brain is something that should not be unfamiliar to most. With the advent of databases, cheap storage, universal bandwidth and shit-loads of PhD’s, the amount of data external to us far exceeds that internal, and the ability to compute that data into quantified wholes far exceeds our own mental capacities to do it.

We have in a sense, through both passive and active participation, externalized ourselves to the degree to which that it is now an impossibility for us to re-ingest that which we have spread upon the world’s databases, server-farms, adaptive-resonance-theory algorithms and vector space computations. There is more Ethan Kaplan out there than there is in the gray matter between my ears.

Usually, we are abutted with the consequences of our data in ways that are either passive or detremental. The supplemental screening, the high interest rate, the targeted mailings, the random Google’s. The outside brain doesn’t always work for us. In most cases, it works against us. In most cases we are only tangentially aware of how we train it.

Pandora in a way is inversing this process. At work, I’m training that brain about my listening habits, and when I get home, I have the reflection of that through my speakers in every room of the house. At home, I can retrain things, create new methods of listening and have that bridge to my office.

In that 3/4 of a mile commute between one and the other, or the 12 to 16 hours I spend outside one space and in the other, Pandora can be thinking, culling, learning from others and treat that temporal displacement as a means of enhancement rather than abandonment.
My brain here, my musical brain, is operating outside of myself, outside of time, outside of space and outside of anything singular intrinsic to me. Its the cummulative effect of many One’s on the Whole, and a reconstitution of that Whole into many versions of the One.

Its only a matter of time before the Outside Brain gets further stimuli, and I wonder what medium, what method of culture, sensory perception or otherwise direct interface with myself will be taken care of. Television? Maybe Joost. Photography? Flickr is trying. News? All the buzz about attention might yet pay off.

What I hope is that at some point, the Outside Brain can merge with the Inside in a manner that we can dictate, and that we can control the Outside just as we try to control the inside. Will my Pandora account need Prozak? Maybe, but will my own personality need an algorithm refresh eventually? Most definately.

The nature of cybernetics is that there is a push/pull between systems which in the end has to balance out. This is done through interference that is both destructive and constructive, but never mutually exclusive. You can’t remove yourself from thermodynamics in any state. Everything always seeks its level.

I wonder then, as we move toward the externalization of self, what then is the internal Self going to do to compensate? A foolish part of me thinks that this will lead to more direct connection between our striped down, naked core to the world at large. Something that can manifest as art, science, love, music and that thing known as living.

The cynic in me though looks at the value of all of the above in the world at large, as we edge toward an externalized sense of self. The cynic in me thinks: we are freeing ourselves to be more human than human, but in the end we are are still framing ourselves through outmoded, anachronistic senses of what Human is.

The most dangerous thing in the world is not a weapon, but a person who forgets there is more to life than living. Its my foolish, optimistic and utopian hope that the technology that allows us to externalize parts of ourselves can likewise help us internalize the core part of ourselves that make us Human.

Pandora played the song that I listened to on the way to propose to my wife the other night.

There is no option in Pandora for saying thanks.