ABSTRACT
At the Echo Nest we track approximately 28 million songs currently available online. Among them is probably a song that would make you happier than anything you have ever heard before. All you have to do is click it and all your personal dreamworlds will be made audible.
But how will you figure out which one to click? Where do you even start?
In this talk I will conduct a short annotated tour through a variety of ways in which I (and the Echo Nest, and Spotify) use computers, math and massive amounts of data to try to drape some kind of thin layer of vaguely intelligible order over the writhing, surging, insatiably expanding information-space-beast of all the world's music.
ABOUT GLENN McDONALD
Glenn McDonald is a Principal Engineer and Data Alchemist for the Echo Nest at Spotify, where he spends his time turning interesting data into meaningful and useful data, or sometimes vice versa. He believes music is the thing humans are best at, and that computers and data ought to be able to help us lose ourselves methodically in joy. His various attempts to explore and organize awe include the genre map Every Noise at Once, the world-on-shuffle Echo Nest Discovery playlist, tabulating and analyzing the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, running the empath heavy metal statistics site, and writing the long-running music-review column The War Against Silence.
