Two days ago I went to this Nomikai (work-related drinking “parties”) with some industry contacts of my lab. While the nomikai itself was not very exciting (I don’t really like this kind of Japanese event, but that’s for another post), I had a nice little neat idea while chatting there.
One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.
A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times – when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible – a lot of research has been done in both areas.
Now, the idea – how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.
A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome :-)
Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition
this could be described as a multi-objective problem, with many users voting based on different preferences: one could cluster users based on a priori declared music genre preferences and take the evaluation of the different groups (e.g. rock, jazz, latin, classical) as conflicting objectives. Then, one would try to approximate the Pareto front on this dynamic objective space (as more users are added into the database). This would indeed be an interesting IEC application. Of course, many other subjective preferences could be asked such as whether users prefer calm or agitated songs and so on.
But then, one wouldn’t even need to explicitly translate the subjective perception concepts towards music input to the system because the whole system could be make a self-organizing one, with a clustering algorithm grouping people with similar voting pattern.
I really loved this idea. Wanna open a start-up with me? :-)