Musical Signatures From Your iTunes Library

We rely on many ways of recognizing people, near at hand or from afar; faces, voices, walks, and even the scents from favorite colognes or perfumes help us greet friends, engage colleagues, and identify strangers.

I was in high school when I first noticed that everyone's key chain made a distinct sound, one that served as a kind of audible calling card that could help recognize people. I started to try to guess who was walking to the front door by learning the unique combinations of sounds -- clinking and tinkling from metal keys, rattling and rubbing from ceramic and plastic tokens, and a myriad of other noises from the incredible miscellany people attach to their key rings and carry around with them through life -- that announced each of my visitors friends. With a little practice, I could pick out the ten or fifteen people I spent the most time with based on listening to the sounds of key chains. Everyone else was someone I didn't see often, which was a fine distinction to draw between when gauging how to answer the door.

There are many other audible cues to identity -- from the closing of a car door, to the sound of foot steps, or cell phone ring tones -- but the key chain is unique because it includes so many different elements: the number and size and materials of the keys, or the layering of different key rings and souveniers people attach to them. A key chain is a sort of impromptu ensemble of found instruments playing little bursts of free jazz like personalized fanfares for modern living.

The sound of someone's key chain also changes over time, as they add or remove things, or rearrange them. That sound can even change in step with the way your relationship to that person changes. For example, if they buy a souvenier with you and put it on their keychain; or if you give them keys to your apartment. Each of these changes reflects shared experiences, and you can hear the difference in sound from one day to the next if you listen carefully.

And like those other ways of recognizing people I mentioned earlier, which all reach the level of being called signatures when they become truly distinctive, the sound of someone's key chain serves a sort of audible signature.

Until now, the sound of a keychain was perhaps the only truly unique audible signature that was not part of our person to begin with (like the voice). Now that Jason Freeman has created the iTunes Signature Maker, we may have an audible signaure suitable for the digital realm. The iTunes Signature Maker scans your iTunes library, taking one or two second snippets of many files, and mixing these found bits of sound together into a short audio signature. You choose from a few parameters such as play count, total number of songs, and whether to include videos, and the signature maker produces a .WAV file.

I made an iTunes signature using Jason's tool a few days ago. I've listened to it a few times. It certainly includes quite a few songs I've listened to often and can recognize from just a one-second snippet. Calligraphers and graphologists make much of a few handwritten letters on a page: music can say a great deal about someone's moods, outlook, tastes, or even what moves their soul. I listen to a lot of music via radio, CD's and even live that isn't included in this. I'm not sure it represents me. I think it's up to everyone else to decide that.

But what can you do with one? It's not practical yet to attach it to email messages, like a conventional .sig. It might be a good way to bookend the mixes I make for friends and family. I can see having a lot of fun listening to a bunch of anonymous iTunes signatures from your friends to try and guess which one belongs to whom. There's real potential for a useful but non-exhaustive answer to the inevitable question, "What kind of music do you like?" when you meet someone new. Along those lines, Jason may have kicked off a new fad in Internet dating; this is the perfect example of a unique token that can compress a great deal of meaning into a small (digital) package that doesn't require meeting or talking to exchange. I can see the iTunes signature becoming a speed-dating requisite; bring your iTunes signature file with you on a flash drive or iPod shuffle, and listen or exchange as necessary.

At least the name is easy: what else would you call this besides a "musig". Maybe an "iSig" or a "tunesig".

Unique ring tones, door chimes, and start-up sounds are only the beginning. Combine musigs with the music genome project, and you could upload your signature to a clearinghouse online, and have it automatically compared for matches against other people's musigs based on patterns and preferences. Have it find someone who likes reggae-influenced waltzes, or fado, or who listens to at least ten of the same artists you enjoy. Build a catalog of one musig every month for a year, and ask the engine to describe the change in your tastes. Add a musig to your Amazon wishlists for gift-giving, or even ask it to predict what you might like based on the songs in the file.

You can download my musig / iSig / tunesig / iTunes signature here; note that it's nearly 8mb.

I'll think I'll try it again in a few months, to see how it changes.

local tags: culture identity itunes media music signatures sound

Recent Acquisitions: The Dead Boys, Gang Starr, The Chemical Brothers

It's to be expected that punk cognoscenti (and - shudder - would be punk cognoscenti...) would dissagree violently over the influences, origins, quality, relevance, and importance of almost every band that anyone else arrogating the label 'punk cognoscenti' to themselves has ever had the temerity to point to as "seminal". (A term which, by the way, may be uniquely suited to punk music by virtue of its etymology). So it's no surprise that even in a set of reviews of Young Loud and Snotty as trite as those offered by Amazon patrons, the infighting is rife and the grammar is bad. Frankly, it's amusing. After all - if you'd buy the album in the first place, would you really care what anyone else thought about it? If ever a music was tortured by its own critical and commercial success, and all the concommmittant disputational vagaries, it was punk...

Not nearly so the case with rap and hip-hop, which became wont to use material declaiming it's stars massive monetary prowess very soon after emerging from the inchoate chaos of block parties and DJ duels in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and many other places that suburban white record buyers still fear to visit. So it was without any taint of gone-rotten-anti-capitalism that I picked up Full Clip, A Decade of Gang Starr at the same moment. I gree with the review on this one - there are several juicy cuts missing, but the overall package is an excellent retrospective of what Guru and DJ Premier achieved between '89 and '99.

Lastly in the new acquisitions department, Come With Us makes the drive home from work positivley invigorating.

local tags: music

The Hives at The Roxy: Veni Vidi Vexatious

Instead of a fun and furious live set from an up and coming retro Mod punk outfit, this was a frankly disappointing example of the misfortunate mismatching that occurs when the media apparatus determines what it wants us to like. Friends loaned me their second album just as the publicity wave was cresting a few weeks ago, and I was mildly excited by the energy I heard on repeated listenings; their live performance didn't sustain the feeling, however, and given what I saw Tuesday, I wouldn't recommend that anyone hoping for as much from them on stage as on disc take the time or trouble.

The basic problem? Bluntly - Howlin' Pete Almqvist wouldn't shut up. I know it's a challenge to play a full set when your catalog is as brief as theirs, but there's just no excuse for stopping after every two-minute song to chatter about how wonderful your band is, and how terribly entertaining you just were; especially when it takes you longer to chatter about your song than it did to play it in the first place. At it's worst, this is like musicus interruptus - it demolishes the natural cyclce of building and releasing tension that any dramatic performance in the Western world not explicitly billed as experimental should follow. I've never been this genuinely annoyed with a headline act. I'll confess to feeling a bit frazzled beore I set foot inside the club, as I'd flown up from Atlanta only an hour before the show, after two full days of user research at an engineering conference (the joys of practicing IA on a tight budget...), but I wasn't alone in feeling the interruptions and disliking them. On my left was a table of five frustrated concert-goers yelling the inevitable "You SUCK", continuously. I'd say it was lack of experience, given their age and newness, but I know The Hives have toured for years, and it seemed that their refusal to engage was more capricious than accidental.

Oh, Mooney suzuki was there as well. What's with the Snake? I didn't mind their product (and it had those sly "we're art school kids larking about with the identity of musicians" timber), but the vocalist looked and acted too much like Nicholas Cage doing his best Mod impression of Elvis to allow me to simply immerse myself in the music. The drummer lloked like one of the Nerds from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

local tags: events hives music