This image is from a paper that I have not read, but I liked the graphic because music like brain activity is represented as a wave.  Is reality a particle or a wave? continuous or discrete?

My husband used to be a DJ and would describe to me the ways that he would structure a set to excite a crowd or calm a crowd. And most people connect certain songs to their personal histories or memories, even consciousness.  Many people believe that before we had spoken language we had song.

What is the connection between music and the mind? I have no idea – there are a ton of different thoughts on the matter and this line of thinking is anything but original. I was talking to a friend who was interested in exploring the spotify api to generate playlists to elicit certain emotional or mental responses.   This prompted me to take a look at see what exactly was possible with the API.

This also coincided with a conversation I had at RC with some folks on how personal a music player is. Different people want different things. One person wants to normalize the gain – (ie make all the songs the same volume), another person does not care about this, but wants access to all the songs that he skips on Spotify to help build a playlist.  Is this functionality that we have access to?

First off, this is sort of an amazing project: 30s Drum Machine. It is a drum machine made from 30 second Spotify samples. The repo is on github for your perusing pleasure.

So first off we can read public playlists and create playlists. We can search for artists, albums, tracks.  or playlist based on a number of parameters including bpms (so you can imagine automatically or technically aided DJ sets.

You can get a user’s recently played tracks but not recently skipped tracks. However, you do have access to user’s personalization preference which means you can probably create custom DJ sets on a person or population basis, which is kinda interesting. Imagine a VR world where everyone is in a club but hears a different song with the same beat profile or profile that elicits the same response,

There are a bunch of libraries in various languages referenced on Spotify but a quick google also turns up Haskell and Rust libraries that are not referenced on the Spotify site. Not sure what I am going to do with this, I will probably do something in March if nothing else so that I can have an excuse to have a very very mellow party.