Upcoming talks and travels

I'm going to be up to a number of things that may be of interest to the readers of this (rather sparse) blog.

Quick summary

• Co-chairing The Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD) Oct 23rd, Chicago
• Presenting some new Musicmetric API features during ISMIR, Oct 24-28 (demo on the 28th), Miami
• Giving a talk about beer and critical tasting at Ignite London 5, Nov 8th, London

WOMRAD

Our workshop (other co-chairs are Amélie Anglade, Òscar Celma, Paul Lamere, and Brian McFee) will cover a diverse array of approaches and angles for music recommendation and discovery. The workshop is runs the full and is part of RecSys 2011, though I sadly can't stay for most of the conference aside from our workshop (see below). It should prove to be an interesting day of research. Are you planning on attending? Let us know.

ISMIR

I'll be dashing off from Chicago to Miami to attend ISMIR, and to present some new (not-yet-released) API features from Musicmetric. While things aren't quite live yet, I can say that in addition to our artist based endpoints, we'll be offering track-based endpoints soon as well, and aligning them with an I-bet-you-can-guess-which large public audio feature test set. More detail on this one to come.

Ignite London 5

Ignite is a series of lightning talks that have taken place in cities all over the world, unified not by a common theme, but a common format: all talks last five minutes, contain 20 slides, and the slides are automatically advanced every 15 seconds. The matching ethos of this structure is perhaps best seen in the Ignite slogan, "Enlighten us, but make it quick." I'll be speaking about beer, style and critical tasting in a talk titled "Ale or Lager and Other False Choices." Here's a brief description:

In a word, my talk is about beer. In a few more words, the driving narrative behind the talk is a crash course in beer styles and more generally, critical tasting. After an extraordinarily brief description of beer, broad ideas of style and the critical tasting process, the core of the talk will be made up of live lightning tastes of commercial examples of various styles of beer (one slide per style, 12 styles covered with one commercial example each). For coherence these tasting slides will grouped into broader styles, with aim toward width, rather than depth of coverage. The styles will be approximately based on those from the BJCP and the Brewer's Association.

I still haven't sorted out the exact spread of beers or how they will be grouped, though I'm leaning toward something simple and obviously ingredient tied (something like -- Lagers, ales:yeast driven, ales:malt forward, ales:hop heavy, with 3 beers each from a different recognized style in each). If anyone has any thoughts about style divisions or specific examples do let me know. If you'd like to go to ignite (and you know you would) the tickets will be available over this way later this week.

So, lots of things going on. Plus there's this other thing I've been working on.

Right, back to it.

publications on playlists in ISMIR

So for this year's ISMIR I'll be doing another tutorial. This one is entitled "Finding A Path Through The Jukebox – The Playlist Tutorial" and I'll be presenting it with Paul Lamere. As you may have guessed by the title it's all about playlists. So to frame some of my background work I thought I'd poke around the ISMIR proceedings to get a more complete idea of all of the papers that dealt with topic across the 10 years of proceedings (plus the just announced titles from this year).

First I did a simple title search using the tool at ismir.net. This shows that from 2000 - 2009 there were 14 papers with 'playlist' occurring somewhere in the title. Here they are over time:

Well, that doesn't show very much, just some interest, no trends or anything. So from there I took a look at the results of at the text search available from Rainer Typke's website. The full text search found some 123 papers mentioning playlist, certainly a few more than the title search. From there I wanted to see what the distribution of these papers was over time (as above), though this took a bit more work, as I couldn't sort out a means to export the search results... Anyway after a bit of counting I got this:

Well, now we're getting somewhere! Clearly there's an increasing number of papers discussing playlists at ISMIR. But wait, you say, this doesn't take into account the considerable expansion of the size of the conference over it's existence. So we can normalize to the number of papers per year that are known the the Cumulative ISMIR proceedings ( [35, 43, 62, 56, 108, 119, 99, 131, 111, 148] from 2000 - 2009 if anyone is interested). Below you can see both the title only and full paper search results normalized to the total number of papers:

The normalization didn't seem to change the trend much. But this leaves me wondering, what can be drawn from the the massive (and growing) disparity between title mentions and fulltext mentions? Obviously one would expect a higher number of hits, but a tenfold increase, seems very large. My first suspicion is that a great deal of this disparity comes from the fact that many papers at ISMIR that mention playlists are actually about something else (music similarity for instance) and then throw on a playlist as something of an afterthought. Perhaps this is an implicit acknowledgment of the great human-factor power of the playlist (as discussed in for instance this paper) or perhaps it's something else entirely.

Regardless of these finer points, it's clearly fair to say that there is a great deal of interest in playlist generation and analysis. If you're interested in these things, why not sign up for our tutorial?