Q

Officially my course began nearly a month ago, and I’m still settling in. Activities that seem to be frequent and recurring include:

1. Reading, reviewing and summarising papers
   1. Looking through journals, conferences etc. for interesting papers
   2. Finding interesting papers only to discover I need a subscription
   3. On gaining access to a paper, finding that the title and abstract do not really reflect the content and in fact it is irrelevant
   4. Finding a relevant paper, starting to read it and discovering that I need more background knowledge from other papers, which returns me to point 2…
2. Defending my thesis before it is written
   1. Being asked what my PhD is about
   2. Trying out a slightly different response each time in the futile hope that someone will go “oh, right” and not ask further questions.
   3. Being asked further questions
   4. Being told “that’s not science” or “that’s not art”, in roughly equal measure
   5. Being told it has already been done
   6. Being told it can’t be done
   7. Continually failing to justify it satisfactorily, probably because I’ve only been working on it a couple of weeks really, and it’s very left-field research in an area most people aren’t familiar with. Hoping to improve this by studious application of section 1.
3. Meeting with my supervisor
   1. Feeling prepared for the meeting
   2. Being asked lots of unexpected questions
   3. Feeling like I’ve been on the wrong track the whole time
   4. Feeling like I have direction again, and becoming confident that I will do the right things next week, leading to 3.1…
4. Spending a lot of time with interesting clever people in the field
   1. Feeling intimidated by their intelligence and experience
   2. Trying to look like I am clever and know things
   3. Trying to learn from them
   4. Finally, just enjoying having the time to chat with all of them, whether the discussion is serious, silly, fruitful or less than useful
   5. Making new friends.

In conclusion, I am having a whale of a time whilst also going through a bit of a rollercoaster of over-confidence and self-doubt. I’m sure it’ll settle down a bit in time. I’m also a bit overwhelmed by the range of literature I need to cover — the project touches on music theory, psychology, social science, data mining, neuroscience, computer cognition… It’s a bit all over the place. Working title is “Investigating beauty in music: a machine learning approach” — ask me about it in person if you want a better explanation. I’m getting better at that.

From JTA’s version of this, at which I did particularly badly.

1. Put your music player on random.
2. Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
3. Let everyone guess what song and artist (or musical) the lines come from.
4. Embolden the songs when someone guesses correctly.

Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

I’m using my last.fm library for this. Who knows what weirdness will come up? Some of these I am very familiar with, others I was hearing for the first time (not the band, but the specific song).

1. I’m playing the game with earthquakes around me
2. Just breathe in the air / But don’t be afraid
3. I was talkin’ to Chuck in his Genghis Khan suit
4. Baby’s getting anxious, the hours getting late
5. Shade, stay, know / but they communicate
6. I took my love, I took it down / I climbed a mountain and I turned around
7. What I want, you’ve got / And it might be hard to handle
8. Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans –> Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode
9. Look at them all on the inside, look at them wasting away
10. Here they come with their make-up on
11. In the here and the now I wait / down among the young and the old
12. Leading everything along / never far from being wrong
13. People / They don’t mean a thing to you
14. San Francisco Bay / Past pier thirty nine
15. We’re no strangers to love / You know the rules and so do i
16. I’m just mad about Saffron, Saffron’s mad about me –> Donovan - Mellow Yellow
17. What gives you the right? / To fuck with our lives?
18. Old world underground, where are you now? –> Metric - IOU
19. On the corner of main street / Just tryin’ to keep it in line –> The Killers - Read My Mind
20. Maybe we’re all different / But we’re still the same

What interested me most is that taken out of context, it is often quite hard to determine the genre / mood of the music given the lyrics. I bet this would be a lot better if a genre was given with it, or if the tune was given instead of the words. Memory is funny like that.

EDIT: Full answers below:

1. Colours Run - On My Side
2. The Verve - Numbness
3. Lou Reed - Wild Child
4. Kiss - Plaster Caster
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Leverage of Space
6. The Smashing Pumpkins - Landslide
7. Hall & Oates - You Make My Dreams
8. Chuck Berry - Johnny B Goode
9. Suede - Lazy
10. AudioSlave - sound of a gun
11. Foo Fighters - X-static
12. The Bravery - Honest Mistake
13. Stereophonics - Have a Nice Day
14. Gotthard - Human Zoo
15. Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
16. Donovan - Mellow Yellow
17. Stars - He Lied About Death
18. Metric - IOU
19. The Killers - Read My Mind
20. Bon Jovi - Welcome To Wherever You Are

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