So many of the selections that great DJs make are curveballs and surprising choices. This is less true in more samey genres, but true pioneering selectors will tend to surprise you with their taste and juxtapositions in a way that's hard or maybe even impossible to really capture in an algorithm.
Put another way, even in something as simple a song selection, the weirdness and contingencies in human creative decision making is a feature not a bug.
The efficiency and cleverness of algorithms can create create great powerful recommendation engines but there's nothing like the idiosyncrasies of a person as a curator.
I'm not entirely convinced by your argument. Some years ago there was an episode of the Gadget Show where they were testing an app for suggesting food ideas. I can't remember how it was supposed to work, it was too long ago, but it was something to do with having profiles of different food types programmed into it and then it used some sort of algorithm to compare taste profiles and come up with combinations that should work.
The combination it came up with that they then tried selling on a food stall was chocolate on pizza. It wasn't to everybody's taste but some liked it, with one describing it as "weirdly delicious".
It doesn't seem completely ridiculous that if an AI could be trained to recognise patterns of music that worked well together that it could analyse a large corpus of recorded music and come up with surprising mixes that you wouldn't think would work, but do.
I don't doubt it's possible to come out of leftfield for an AI DJ but I still wonder if it could be a tastemaker like a great DJ. I don't just want great individual mixes, I want consistent, surprising yet tasteful selections that define an idiosyncratic style.
Many restaurant chains sell chocolate on their pizza base as a dessert; chocolate is also known to complement many savoury dishes as a 'secret ingredient'.
There's a restaurant in London that incorporates cacao in some form or other in every dish. It's a bit of a gimmick in that in a lot of them it's not really noticeable, or just used very sparingly. It's probably easier to do with the constraint of "some form of cacao" than chocolate, though.
For sure! I'll always appreciate the deeper stuff that only humans can do. I just think it would be interesting to see how much of it we could automate. E.g., could it get to the level of decent background music?
So many of the selections that great DJs make are curveballs and surprising choices. This is less true in more samey genres, but true pioneering selectors will tend to surprise you with their taste and juxtapositions in a way that's hard or maybe even impossible to really capture in an algorithm.
Put another way, even in something as simple a song selection, the weirdness and contingencies in human creative decision making is a feature not a bug.
The efficiency and cleverness of algorithms can create create great powerful recommendation engines but there's nothing like the idiosyncrasies of a person as a curator.