The Spotification of genre

February 12, 2023 /
Every Noise at Once, a scatterplot of music genres. "Deep adult standards" is currently highlighted.

I ran into this article by Cherie Hu about how Spotify assigns genre labels to its catalog. That is, algorithmically. It is 2023, after all.

Genre labels like “Escape Room” and “Vapor Twitch,” but also “Indie Pop” and “Hip Hop” — the neologized and the widely accepted — don’t come from a set of shared musical qualities. At least, not initially, and not directly. Spotify tracks the listening habits of its 456 million active users, and it defines genre based on the patterns that emerge. In Hu’s words, “membership in the Escape Room [or any Spotify genre] would be impossible if Spotify were using a purely musical algorithm.”

A poem that I think about maybe once a week is Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” In it, the speaker is passing through the Scottish Highlands when he hears a woman singing in a language he doesn’t understand.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wordsworth didn’t have Shazam. Under those circumstances, he’d have never heard the song again. Even up through the 20th century, you listened to a vinyl like you read a magazine, and from a physical (and potentially destructible) collection no less.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that streaming is probably the greatest creative revolution of all time. Not only that, but streaming platforms have the power to fundamentally reshape how we interact with art. We tell Spotify what we like, and it uses that information to make sense of the infinitely diverse creative impulses of musicians. The platform returns with a raft of brand-new genres that correlate strongly with our interests. Once, people had scarce, random access to data. Now, there is more data available than we could ever interpret on our own. We only get to see what we are shown.

We adapt ourselves to the “peculiar demands of machines,” to borrow language from Don Norman. This isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion. It’s not a good thing, either. For what it’s worth, the genre labels are still determined by people with immense, intangible knowledge of music. (Or at least they were as of 2016, when Cherie Hu’s article was published.) Algorithms excel at describing what many people are doing, but people still have a monopoly on good taste. Plus, they’re more fun to talk to when you find something you love.

Walking in fog

February 12, 2023 /
Two apartment buildings in the fog. The structures aren't very visible, except for several lit windows.

More city planners should take a walk in heavy fog. Not that I have some scathing opinion about apartment density, but I do think it’s compelling to view the buildings as shapeless dwelling places for squares of light.

Once, when I was walking by the public library, I heard this conversation like it was crystal clear, except that none of the words were intelligible (not that those two things are mutually exclusive). That day was gorgeous, not foggy, and the voices came from eight stories up or so where a person was swinging one leg out over the street. They chatted with someone inside. I used to think that was just the coolest. (I still do, but recently I’ve found high places extremely disorienting.)

However you feel with respect to eighth-story windows and formless, spiny structures in the fog, maybe there’s something to be taken from the inside-outness of windows in apartment buildings.

Paths of least resistance

February 12, 2023 /
A side-by-side image of a stone block set on water, next to an image of the same block wet up to half its height.
Water goes “up,” just not uphill.

An interesting fact about water: it will basically never flow uphill. Water follows the laziest path, whichever declines the most nearby, towards a place where there is no further decline to follow. It follows the path of least resistance. Even if there’s a good reservoir just one bump in the pavement behind it, the water will go miles and miles, through rivers and into oceans, in order to move forward.

“Path of least resistance” comes to us from folk physics, which refers to our regular perception of how the world moves. It also owns maybe the most derisively editorialized Wikipedia page I’ve ever seen. In the, say, 300 words of its runtime, only half a clause actually reference the energy states (the real principle at play here). The rest is a takedown of intuition that would make Vince McMahon blush.

Probably the scientists and educators actually discovering these things aren’t also the ones dunking on layman observations about the physical world. Because their discoveries are really interesting. For example, what came to me as a metaphor-rich puddle in my parking garage led me through a steeplechase of circumstances in which, actually, water does flow uphill. Do you know what a superfluid is? Its whole raison d’être is to flow uphill. The atoms of a superfluid work in perfect unison, and that zeroing of internal friction allows it to slip through microscopic cracks and climb up walls.

(This ruins the central visual theme of this post, but note that water definitely can’t be a superfluid. Helium, as far as I know, is the only one we’ve discovered. Although I did find a weird video essay doomsaying water as a potentially apocalyptic superfluid.)

Why would the fluid climb up walls? Because lots of fluids climb up walls. Usually friction and cohesion are enough to stop runaway water molecules from escaping up the edge of a cup. But if adhesion to the walls is stronger than cohesion between the molecules, you get capillary action, which is a basic function of sustaining life.

Personally, I’m not reading too much into the metaphorical heaviness of capillary action. I thought it was symbolic how a puddle would rather take the low road than do something just a little hard. Then I looked a little harder through that instinct and started wishing I could always find a way to flow forward, even when I’m surrounded by so many impossible endpoints. There’s something in the unison of a superfluid and the impulse to climb that rings in those other vignettes, too.

In any case, a little observation is always a good thing. Folksy or otherwise.

Seeing the river

February 12, 2023 /
Part of the Taking Stock with Teens infographic
Olive Garden. Olive Garden. | Photo via Piper Sandler

Twice each year — once in the spring and once in the fall — the international banking firm Piper  Sandler publishes its “Taking Stock with Teens” survey. The questionnaire is administered to 10,000 teenagers (average age 15.8), the objective to find out how young people are spending money.

Should we be giving investors the skeleton key for marketing to children? I don’t know that I can say. But the results are kind of incredible. It reads almost like a good Agatha Christie story. There are quiet “oh, I see” moments (teens still use mostly cash — of course they do, they can’t open bank accounts), as well as twists that, frankly, send me reeling. Favorite celebrity? Adam Sandler.

For context, three of Adam Sandler’s most recent movies are Hubie Halloween, Uncut Gems, and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.

For context, remember that the name of the firm is “Piper Sandler,” which compels me to imagine that this result is a dizzying fluke of word association. But anyway.

I don’t know why this survey captures my attention so much. It would’ve been last month that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim celebrated its tenth anniversary, which I mention because that game was as transformative for me as church, or Septimus Heap, or those days when the ice cream truck would come to my middle school. I knew I loved video games and played them often, but I tracked the release of Skyrim like a stormchaser. I watched press interviews and gameplay demos. Before, I had a handful of games I enjoyed, but found them mostly by scrolling through the Wii Shop until I found a title I’d heard of on YouTube. Skyrim wasn’t just the first video game release I’d followed. It was the first time I had felt like an expert, maybe ever. I remember facing the camera towards a river, and quoting to my older brother something I’d heard the developer say about the graphics of the water.

Still looks better than the metaverse. | Photo via TechCrunch

Skyrim turning 10 didn’t make me feel old, not like the Piper Sandler survey does. Or, given that I’m only 22, it didn’t make me feel like I was aging. With respect to movies and video games and TV shows, something that came out five years ago might as well have come out 15, or 25 years ago. They’re not “new,” so they’re “in the past.” History is very flat to me.

But I didn’t know who Emma Chamberlain was, and how am I supposed to reckon with the fact that the number one snack among teenagers is Goldfish. Goldfish. As a young person, it’s easy for me to view my cohort as, somehow, fundamentally in opposition to the generation before us. The Piper Sandler survey is a clue that, when my hairline recedes and my nose is cratered burgundy, the challenge will not be learning to appreciate young people. It will be learning to understand them at all.