Blog

Fri 13 Mar – Mr Purcell's Youthfull Fantazias
Never saw some of those instruments being played life. It almost felt like having traveled 350 years back in time, and some of the audience might actually have been just as old. Wigmore Hall was the perfect setting. Gwen and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Last weekend I had a wonderful time at the Summer Sundae Weekender festival in Leicester (official page). Most performances and the atmosphere were great. We had plenty of sun as well as some rain and mud. My favourite part of the program was Phrased & Confused, with highlights such as Aoife Mannix & Janie Armour (who don’t even have a Last.fm page yet!) and Essie Jain (to name an example of someone who does have a Last.fm page).

The festival organizers donated about 15,000£ to Oxfam, and Oxfam organized about 80 volunteer stewards. My wife and I were two of those volunteers.

One of the nice things about Oxfam stewarding is free entry, free camping, and some free meals. The first task I did was to welcome artists at the VIP area: smiling, making sure they had the right wrist bands, opening a tent door, and if necessary I’d point out that lunch wouldn’t be served before 1pm (btw, all the artist I met, and whose names I don’t know, were really nice people). Another interesting shift I did was to help “wristbanding” visitors at the entrance during the peak queue time. The professional staff and the Oxfam stewards tried their best to keep the long queue as short as possible but the new electronic ticketing system and the validation machines were a major bottleneck (at some point it was longer than 40 minutes).

The most interesting shift I did was a nightshift at the entrance to one of the camping sites together with some other stewards and professional festival security. I learned about how to (not) measure how good an artist is, why certain artists are complete idiots (because of how they risk the safety of their fans), which gigs were complete rip offs, and which ones are really good. And at Sunday around 7am I even had the opportunity to do some plumbing: making sure early birds wouldn’t run out of water while taking their showers.
Overall, I had the pleasure to work together with very fine people while enjoying great music. It was a wonderful experience. Oxfam already started drafting volunteers for next year’s festivals. I highly recommend participating! :-)

The islands of music playground demonstration is something like a tag cloud where similar tags are located close to each together. The map was created using clustering algorithms.

These algorithms group similar music on islands. Similar islands are placed close to each other. For example, various flavours of metal are located close to each other in the upper right of the map. The map also suggests several more or less continuous transitions. For example, there is a path from folk to doom metal (via psychedelic, progressive rock, and progressive metal).

Another somewhat curious example is the sea of mistagged artist where various flavours of non-English world music can be found. Generally, not all clusters make sense and part of the explanation is that there is plenty of noise in the data.


In more technical terms:

The map is a self-organizing map of 13,000 randomly sampled Last.fm users labelled with tags and artists associated with each user.

Each of these 13,000 users is described with a tag cloud which is extracted from the music the user listens to. This data is normalized in a similar way as described here . One consequence of this is that a large part of alternative indie rock pop is averaged out.

After all the normalization and pre-processing the 13k users are represented by 2000 distinct tags resulting in 13k sparse vectors in a 2k-dimensional tag vector space.

Using singular value decomposition (SVD) the dimensionality is reduced to 120 dimensions. This 120-dimensional space is a latent semantic space in which no distinction is made, for example, between brazil and brasil.

Using k-means clustering 400 prototypical users are computed. Users very close to the zero-vector are not considered for further analysis. (Given the normalization and the latent space mapping, these zero-vector users can be interpreted as either very average users, or so unique that they can’t be described within the 120-dimensional space.)

Using a self-organizing map (SOM) the latent space is mapped to a 2-dimensional visualization space. The SOM has a size of 20 rows and 40 columns. A smoothed data histogram of the SOM is computed and visualized so that clusters show up as islands.

Amazing collection of themed tag radio stations:
http://www.last.fm/group/The+Special+Interest+Tag+Radio+Collective

Nicely organized list of free MP3s on Last.fm:
http://www.last.fm/user/meyde/journal/

When people asked me if it isn’t dangerous to cycle in London I’d always reply that it isn’t at all. Car drivers are generally much more relaxed than in Vienna, and the police are much friendlier as well. There are bus lanes everywhere that can be used as bicycle lanes. And there are even some dedicated bicycle lanes. But tonight everything changed.

I was cycling home slowly along Old Street which is always very busy Friday night. Btw, recently I learned that pushbike is the proper work for bicycle in London. So I was slowly cruising with my pushbike next to another car that was slowing down because of a red light ahead. Suddenly a car driver (sitting in a parked car) swung his door open right into my front wheel. There was nothing I could do other than head but the car right next to me and try not to fall on my rucksack which contained my laptop. Now my front wheel looks as though it was designed by Dali.

Although I couldn’t avoid banging my rucksack against something, I was very lucky the only damage to my laptop has been that it doesn’t snap closed any more. Maybe using a rubber band instead will do. Btw, that reminds me that my last backup has been a while ago. If I don't forget I'll do one tomorrow.

I might have had more luck than brains as we say in Austria. My glasses got scratched only a tiny bit, my face is swollen but hardly noticeable if I look into the mirror without wearing my glasses, and my elbow’s a bit bruised. None of which matter. But hey, imagine I would have been an old lady. I might have died! Maybe.

I’ve already crashed into, nearly crashed into, or flown over so many car doors swung open in front of me while pushbiking (especially while I was working as pushbike messenger in Vienna). I truly believe its about time that car drivers learn to double check if a pushbike is behind them :-/

After having felt a short moment of rage while I was spread out on the ground with my bike on top of me (especially when the car driver decided to open his door a bit more and thereby pushing it right into my face), and after realizing what had happened (and what luckily hadn't), and after moving my Dali designer pushbike from the street, and after the car driver gave me 30 quid to get my front wheel replaced, and after he friendly apologized, I figured that life isn’t that bad after all. But the best part is that I just realized that we have a bicycle radio station. But I haven't figured out yet what people actually mean with "bicycle" music :-)