WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

Wordnet is a database that comes with a query command line interface as well as a comprehensive collection of local interfaces. The python interface has been used by Trapdoor to create DrawBot (Mac only unfortunately) which is a Processing-like, but Python based, IDE. The output is simply amazing!

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents right out-of-the-box (without additional statistical training)

ConceptNet is written completely in Python. The site has a flash demo on that demonstates it’s functionatily.

It’s not as pretty as DrawBot but the application itself seems a whole lot more accesable. WordNet is an academic tool where ConceptNet looks to give you more human feedback.

I’ll be playing with them over the next few days to see what they’re like.

I’ve never really been a pop music fan and this article gets into some of the reasons why:

The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can “predict” the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years’ worth of Billboard hit singles - 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

Come on! What happened to good music for good music’s sake? Something about this makes me cringe. Pop music is so driven by sales and marketing that it makes me sick. That’s why pop music is so disposable; it has no substance whatsoever, every song sounds a whole lot like the last one. Pop music is what it would be like to be stuck in a Groundhog Day.

Last.fm introduced me to Seefeel a few days ago. Its some sort of ambient dub electronica backed by sweet haunting vocals. So I went out and got the album last night and I just can’t stop listening too it. What’s truly incredible about the album though is that it’s 10 years old! Show me a pop album with that kind of longevity.

HSS’s crucial design flaw is that it can only look at the past. Those “leftfield”, illogical and grassroots-inspired departures from the norm, such as disco or drum and bass, could not have been predicted - but they shift the mainstream and provide the momentum any culture needs to remain fresh.

I’ll stick to my departures from the norm thank you. What’s really scary / sad is that they’re planning on using this at radio stations by letting the software pick the playlists. It’s bad enough that dj’s have to play their shows from a playlist, now that list is being choosen by a machine. What next?

Sounds to me like a software future is becoming a reality…