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hpDJ: An automated DJ with floorshow feedback (by Dave Cliff)
Introduction
Many radio stations and nightclubs employ Disk-Jockeys (DJs) to provide a
continuous uninterrupted stream or “mix” of dance music, built from a sequence of
individual song-tracks. In the last decade, commercial pre-recorded compilation
audio CDs of DJ mixes have become a significant growth market. DJs exercise skill
in deciding an appropriate sequence of tracks and in mixing 'seamlessly' from one
track to the next. Online access to large-scale archives of digitized music via
automated music information retrieval systems offers users the possibility of
discovering many songs that they like, but the majority of consumers are unlikely to
want to learn the DJ skills of sequencing and mixing, and even if they had such
skills, they may not have the time to devote to the mixing task. This chapter starts
with a description of hpDJ, an automatic DJ system in which compilations of dance2
music can be sequenced and seamlessly mixed by computer, with minimal user
involvement. The user may specify a selection of tracks, and may give a qualitative
indication of the type of mix required. The resultant mix can be presented as a
continuous single digital audio file, whether for burning to CD, or for play-out from
a personal playback device such as an iPod, or for play-out to rooms full of dancers
in a nightclub. Results from an early version of this system have been tested on an
audience of patrons in a London nightclub, with very favourable results. Subsequent
to that experiment, we designed technologies that allow the hpDJ system to monitor
the responses of crowds of dancers (or listeners), so that hpDJ can dynamically react
to those responses from the crowd. The initial intention was that hpDJ would
monitor the crowd’s reaction to the song-track currently being played, and use that
response to guide its selection of subsequent song-tracks in the mix. In that version,
it was assumed that all the song-tracks existed in some archive or library of prerecorded
files. However, once reliable crowd-monitoring technology is available, it
becomes possible to use the crowd-response data to dynamically “remix” existing
song-tracks (i.e, alter the track in some way, tailoring it to the response of the
crowd) and even to dynamically “compose” new song-tracks suited to that crowd.
Thus, the music played by hpDJ to any particular crowd of listeners on any
particular night becomes a direct function of that particular crowd’s particular
responses on that particular night. On a different night, the same crowd of people
might react in a different way, thereby leading hpDJ to create different music. Thus,
the music composed and played by hpDJ could be viewed as an emergent property
of the dynamic interaction between the computer system and the crowd, and the
crowd could then be viewed as having collectively collaborated on composing the
music that was played on that night, but the act of collaboration is also one of
consumption: it’s the crowd’s appreciation of currently-playing music that leads
hpDJ to create the next piece of music. This en masse collective composition raises
some interesting legal issues regarding the ownership of the composition (i.e.: who,
exactly, is the author of the work?), but revenue-generating businesses can
nevertheless plausibly be built from such technologies.
