it always amazes me how much we try to impose some sort of order in our lives out of absolutely random events. the constant desire for meaning leads people to see significance in things that really aren’t, and to read more into things than they should.
there’s a lot of good examples of this in grand life-affecting things, but it seems that we notice this more in little trivialities like the shuffle play features on our mp3 or cd players.
cd changers have had this feature for years and years, but now with mp3 collections on computers and ipods, you have a much larger selection of songs to choose from. when you have it randomly shuffle songs to play, some people suddenly marvel at the brilliant way it picks exactly the right song to follow the first, and think, “there must be something that’s doing that! it can’t be random!”
thus comes this inane article in the nytimes yesterday about how people think their ipod shuffles are almost sentient:
Mr. Greist rides his bike 15 hours a week, often more than three hours at a time. To get him through the tedium of this workout, he created a 40-song mix called “What It Takes,” a name derived from a quotation on a documentary film about Lance Armstrong’s training for the 2000 Tour de France. (After Armstrong defies his team manager’s orders and races up a snowy mountain, his team manager says into the camera, “Now, that’s what it takes to win the Tour de France.”)
The iPod “knows somehow when I am reaching the end of my reserves, when my motivation is flagging,” Mr. Greist insisted. “It hits me up with ‘In Da Club,’ and then all of a sudden I am in da club.”
“It really likes Ruben Studdard,” the winner of “American Idol’s” second season, Mr. Angus said. This, despite the fact that he only has one song of Mr. Studdard’s - the soulful ballad “Sorry 2004” - stored on his 20-gigabyte player. “There’s nothing worse than when you are having an intense workout and Ruben comes on,” he said, “but it seems to always happen to me.”
Lucy Shaw, a social worker in New York, has stopped using Shuffle altogether. “It was totally not reading my moods,” she said. It would play upbeat music when she was feeling low, and dark, somber selections when she was feeling upbeat. Furthermore, she said, her device had a penchant for picking songs containing four minutes of dead air followed by a bonus track - like Brian Ferry’s “More Than This” (the song to which Bill Murray sings karaoke in “Lost in Translation,” a bonus track on the film’s soundtrack album).
At the macslash.org discussion site, one posting said: “I’m pretty sure iTunes is not sorting my songs randomly. It seems to learn. I’d say it’s using some Bayesian logic and/or simple neural networks to vary probabilities of songs to be selected and adjust parameters of selection by the users history of song skipping.”
When confronted with such elaborate theories, Stan Ng, Apple Computer’s director of iPod product marketing, laughed. “The funny thing about it is that it really is random,” he said. “When you turn on Shuffle Songs, it creates a randomized list of all the music on your iPod without repeating a song.”
more than anything, i think that it’s just a case where subconsciously, in seeking order, you notice the good happy musical accidents more, and then write off the ones that normally don’t notably mix together as just, well, random.
on the other hand, maybe ms. shaw should consult her psychic to find out why her ipod is not reading her moods. maybe it’s mad at her.
hell, maybe i’ll start passing myself off as an ipod psychic.
Posted at August 27, 2004 11:27 AMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.