The question to be asked in one of our latest activity reports is: Why do music genres almost always focus around the style of music, but not the message it carries or is the message inherently tied to the style?
Our group of musicologists tried to dig into this question over the past months and came up with several different classifications that are not commonly used.
So if you for example open up Winamp 2.81, look at the ID3 tag of an mp3 and select the Genre drop down list you'll notice lots of different entries, probably over 100, ranging from A Cappella to Vocal. If you single out the most common ones, as far as this is possible, without digging into your more favorite ones, you'll still be left with lots of options. For one, we could divide everything into Alternative, Pop and Classic and explain that every others would be subcategories. In some cases this would work well, in some other cases this would not work so well, it is still a very abstract description and it is arguable if "Alternative" is just to satisfy the people trying to seperate their minds from the "mainstream". Overall it's pretty hard to distinguish between Alternative and Pop and it becomes even more so when more and more Bands from Alternative become popular enough, alternative music becoming popular. Additionally what to do with music such as 50s, 60s, 70s or the synthesizer music of the 80s - Alternative when they were Pop in the past? Still Pop or add them to the Mozarts, Beethovens and Bachs? There arises already a conflict, because Classic would suggest a classification that is time based, but Pop and Alternative much more focus on the number of people listing to it, radio stations playing it and popularity has more problems like Folk music which is hard to classify that way.
So the current situation is a compromise between classifying every band as own genre and just call it all music. It is trying to develop a name for the message of the various bands and artists, so that we have Rock'n'Roll, Rap, Hip-Hop, Rock, Metal,.. . And the message in this case both means the textual content (the semantics) and the envelope (the music/expression), because quite obviously the same vocal message can be sent in different envelopes and both is important to humans. We have yet to look into how exactly the semiotic framework applies here.
Based on this, we'll also more look at the message of the music for genre classification and examine content and envelope to fit the group or song into a genre. What we are going to develop is a matrix of textual content (love, rage against authority, hate, well-feeling,...) and music style based on some more easy factors such as beat, amplitude and some more complex ones as frequency analysis, cleaness and others. Given that we can put a good abstraction for textual content that is equally detailed for every entry we could classify all kinds of music, because what really differes us humans is not the text - all these feelings are inherently tied to humanity - but the envelope, which is on the one hand bounded by the limitation of our ears and on the other unlimited in our creativity of how to express things.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Friday, February 18, 2005
Dreamland Workshop for the living Dead
When you have come to the point, where it seems impossible to go on and Black Jack awaits for your arrival, you should always remember that you should have taken the Dreamland Workshop for the living Dead and reading on now is definately a step in the right direction. Find TEH theory on the universe, life and everything here.
(i) The first thing to keep in mind is that death is part of life as much as birth is. There is no beginning and no end and this beginning-end thinking stems from a look that is too close and focused. The apple grows and falls off the tree, the human is born, the human dies. If you however extract yourself from this view and view it from a larger distance you will always be able to see cycles and cycles over cycles. Next year the apple grows again and falls off again and will continue to do so. New humans are born with the combined genetic information.
(ii) The next thing to see is that there is infinity everywhere, but not in the sense that you can never reach the end of the universe, the infinity is that on the surface of a ball, no matter in which direction you go, you will never reach the end, however you may run across locations you have already been. The space is constrained, but the movement is not.
(iii) The third and final thing to remember is that everything is energy, as proven by Einstein's famous formula: E=mc^2 which basically says that energy equals matter. Energy cannot be destroyed and cannot be created it is available in various different forms which can only change shape. Electricity may become heat and heat may be transformed into movement. I have an activity report concerning energy transformations on my desk, which I will summarize at a later date.
These things allow us to view the universe life and everything as a process of reoccuring cycles that will continue in limited space for an infinite amount of time and with a limited amount of energy (=matter). The universe is an automata!
An automata is simply described as a 5 tupel, with states, input, output and 2 functions, one that produces output and the other that advances the state. The universe is slightly different as there is no input. This is called a feedback automata and means that the universe advances in state solely based on its current state. The transition function is that of the laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics,... but much richer than what we know now. If the universe produces an output is yet unknown.
And here comes the very first thing again: cycles. The universe, which is nothing else than the current state of the feedback automata may come to a point where it has been already and because only the current state is used to decide the next state, the universe cycles. There exists a special automata which has a cycle of maximum length and where the universe passes each possible states except the zero state.
We can only speculate on wether our universe is an automata with maximum length that will transform into all the different possibilities or if we are trapped in some cycle that uses only a part of the possible states of the universe. A requirement would certainly be that the space is discrete, if this is the case, is still unknown.
Anyway, if we'd acknowledge the Big Bang Theory this would mean that eventually the universe will collapse again and the Big Bang will reoccur expanding the same universe again. There you have a cycle and you can split it up at any point to have your beginning and end, it will still be a cycle.
It is clear that this restricts our abilities of free will and such as we are all part of a function whose behavior is given, but only predictable as the exact calculation would require an automata the same size of the universe, which is impossible to achieve when we cannot escape our universe.
We cannot change our future, we can only explore it. Those who expect a manual on what to do, much as pretty much all religions deliver may be dissapointed, but I cannot help you.
Our departments are going to examine this for possible applications and technologies. I perceive interesting things to surface.
(i) The first thing to keep in mind is that death is part of life as much as birth is. There is no beginning and no end and this beginning-end thinking stems from a look that is too close and focused. The apple grows and falls off the tree, the human is born, the human dies. If you however extract yourself from this view and view it from a larger distance you will always be able to see cycles and cycles over cycles. Next year the apple grows again and falls off again and will continue to do so. New humans are born with the combined genetic information.
(ii) The next thing to see is that there is infinity everywhere, but not in the sense that you can never reach the end of the universe, the infinity is that on the surface of a ball, no matter in which direction you go, you will never reach the end, however you may run across locations you have already been. The space is constrained, but the movement is not.
(iii) The third and final thing to remember is that everything is energy, as proven by Einstein's famous formula: E=mc^2 which basically says that energy equals matter. Energy cannot be destroyed and cannot be created it is available in various different forms which can only change shape. Electricity may become heat and heat may be transformed into movement. I have an activity report concerning energy transformations on my desk, which I will summarize at a later date.
These things allow us to view the universe life and everything as a process of reoccuring cycles that will continue in limited space for an infinite amount of time and with a limited amount of energy (=matter). The universe is an automata!
An automata is simply described as a 5 tupel, with states, input, output and 2 functions, one that produces output and the other that advances the state. The universe is slightly different as there is no input. This is called a feedback automata and means that the universe advances in state solely based on its current state. The transition function is that of the laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics,... but much richer than what we know now. If the universe produces an output is yet unknown.
And here comes the very first thing again: cycles. The universe, which is nothing else than the current state of the feedback automata may come to a point where it has been already and because only the current state is used to decide the next state, the universe cycles. There exists a special automata which has a cycle of maximum length and where the universe passes each possible states except the zero state.
We can only speculate on wether our universe is an automata with maximum length that will transform into all the different possibilities or if we are trapped in some cycle that uses only a part of the possible states of the universe. A requirement would certainly be that the space is discrete, if this is the case, is still unknown.
Anyway, if we'd acknowledge the Big Bang Theory this would mean that eventually the universe will collapse again and the Big Bang will reoccur expanding the same universe again. There you have a cycle and you can split it up at any point to have your beginning and end, it will still be a cycle.
It is clear that this restricts our abilities of free will and such as we are all part of a function whose behavior is given, but only predictable as the exact calculation would require an automata the same size of the universe, which is impossible to achieve when we cannot escape our universe.
We cannot change our future, we can only explore it. Those who expect a manual on what to do, much as pretty much all religions deliver may be dissapointed, but I cannot help you.
Our departments are going to examine this for possible applications and technologies. I perceive interesting things to surface.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Dreamland Tarjetas
Last December, head of Project Dreamland Inc., Mister Donnie D., started a campaign to reduce the plastic card overflow in his wallet. As he counted there have been 14 cards, some obsolete, lots of potentially important bills and several coins.
The tarjeta that has been developed and that will probably enter QA in a few decades is an all extensible, modular, lightweight and yet highly durable polymer card using latest carbon polymerisation technology and high durability treatment. It is the one card that will replace all the others and that everyone has been waiting for.
At the same time this is your credit card, bank account card, membership card to all your organization, refund card,... think of any possible card, the tarjeta it is!
Security is guaranteed through biometric technology like fingerprint and free-will detection so that you cannot be forced to use it.
You also never need to take care where you left it, just call it and it will teleport in.
The tarjeta that has been developed and that will probably enter QA in a few decades is an all extensible, modular, lightweight and yet highly durable polymer card using latest carbon polymerisation technology and high durability treatment. It is the one card that will replace all the others and that everyone has been waiting for.
At the same time this is your credit card, bank account card, membership card to all your organization, refund card,... think of any possible card, the tarjeta it is!
Security is guaranteed through biometric technology like fingerprint and free-will detection so that you cannot be forced to use it.
You also never need to take care where you left it, just call it and it will teleport in.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Dreamland Universal Translator
We found it necessary to invent an online universal translator to faciliate communication with other people. However there arose several problems during the development and because our staff is deployed all over the world, the current version is of littel use. We used several neural nets and support vector machines to train it, but after hours of talking and training it would only translate form the click-clack tones of kalahari-people to a little spoken accent in the tibetian mountains.
We are working hard and meanwhile try to use our hands, legs and video conferencing system to ask our way through. Mr Donnie D is pressing for a final version, but it can take months before it could possibly translate into and from spanish.
We are working hard and meanwhile try to use our hands, legs and video conferencing system to ask our way through. Mr Donnie D is pressing for a final version, but it can take months before it could possibly translate into and from spanish.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Dreamland HQMover 0.23 beta
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Dreamland HIV Protective Suit
It's called condom, actually, but if you prefer you can name it "HIV protective suit".
The tech geeks of you may add a model number such as MkIV.
HIV protective suits save you from getting AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and is a very nasty illness that turns a simple flu into life threatening danger.
They don't save you from dying though, that is inevitable.
Btw, I am trying to write a script based on the story "The Last Trumpet" by Isaac Asimov. Drop me a mail, if you've read it and got a good idea.
The tech geeks of you may add a model number such as MkIV.
HIV protective suits save you from getting AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and is a very nasty illness that turns a simple flu into life threatening danger.
They don't save you from dying though, that is inevitable.
Btw, I am trying to write a script based on the story "The Last Trumpet" by Isaac Asimov. Drop me a mail, if you've read it and got a good idea.
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