Prologue: Open Plan
Introduction: Technology with Humanity
Chapter 1 Too Much Music
Chapter 2 Captivating Algorithms
Chapter 3 What Are Listeners Like?
Chapter 4 Hearing and Counting
Chapter 5 Space Is the Place
Chapter 6 Parks and Recommendation
Epilogue: What Are We Really Doing Here?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. He is coeditor of Towards an Anthropology of Data.
"Artists and music journalists have been coining genres for
decades, based on sounds shared between artists. This new era for
genre is derived from listener data and labelled by engineers who,
Seaver says, never expected to become authorities on the matter.
This speaks to the contradiction at the heart of Computing Taste:
it’s both easier and harder to pinpoint a person’s music taste than
you might expect. It all depends on what you think taste is.
Spotify can tell us how many times we loop a favorite song, make
reasonable assumptions about the genres that speak to us, and
deduce from GPS data what we might want to hear in the gym as
opposed to the office. But Seaver stresses that a key
anthropological question remains unwrapped: why do people love the
songs that they do?"
*Guardian*
"Recommendations now 'drive close to half of all users’ streams',
according to Spotify’s co-president Gustav Söderström. In Computing
Taste, an ethnography of the data scientists and product managers
working in 'the world of music recommendation', Seaver gives an
account of the way this sort of technology operates. The job of his
interviewees, who tend to work for private companies hired by
streaming services, is to help their clients 'answer an apparently
simple question: what’s next?'"
*London Review of Books*
"The central premise uniting these theories is that we can’t really
tell an algorithm who we are; we have to show it. Platforms used to
offer recommendations based on clear user inputs (consider that
Netflix used to ask you to rate a movie out of five stars); now
things have gotten murkier as our behavior is tracked and collated
in complex, opaque ways. Consumers have learned to adjust their
actions to get the content they want, according to Nick Seaver, an
anthropology professor at Tufts University and the author of
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation.
'You were much more in control of how you represented yourself
under those [earlier] systems,' Seaver told me. Now our
behavior—even the embarrassing kind—generates our unique media
world."
*Atlantic*
"Computing Taste is a valuable resource for scholars in music and
anthropology at a time of increasing need of interdisciplinary
dialogue between information technology and the humanities at
large."
*Notes*
"A useful deep dive into precisely how these systems are built, the
people who build them, their goals and aspirations, and much
more."
*Arts Fuse*
"Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation
is a pleasure to read. It is well-written, with nice turns of
phrase. I commend it to anyone interested in how media works in the
21st century."
*Metascience*
"Streaming music services are the norm today, but people don't
often think about how they work or how they recommend the next
song. Seaver peeks behind the musical curtain in this book about
the humans behind the algorithms. . . . Music lovers and those who
like books about artificial intelligence will enjoy Seaver's deep
dive into the culture, data, and science of music recommendation
systems. Computing Taste offers insight into algorithmic music
recommendations that's entertaining and easily digestible."
*Library Journal*
"I would recommend this book if you identify with the following
phrase, which is taken from Seaver’s interview with one music
company engineer: ‘I’m plagued by the idea that there’s something I
haven’t heard yet.’ Music nerds will especially appreciate that
Seaver proposes definitions for topics that are hard to describe,
like taste and genre. They will enjoy identifying their habits in
Chapter 3, ‘What are Listeners Like?’ and learning how music
engineers define obscure subgenres like ‘shiver pop.’ . . . The
peeks into these veiled companies are almost reminiscent of spy
novels. If you’re interested in start-up culture and liked The
Social Network, there’s something for you in this book. Throughout
Computing Taste, Seaver comments on the balancing act between
artificial intelligence and human expertise. He says the title ‘is
meant to index that tension’—to probe how technological systems can
coexist with something as personal as music taste."
*Daily Cardinal*
"The gap between technology and culture might not be as wide as we
think, says Seaver in his analysis of how music recommender systems
are produced. . . . You’ll come away from Computing Taste realizing
that algorithms aren’t the enemy, ready to think again.“
*Engineering and Technology*
“Seaver’s nimble account of how contemporary music recommendation
systems are conceived and crafted takes readers beyond easy
oppositions of humans and algorithms to explore the captivating
dynamics of taste and technics, hearing and computing, guidance and
coercion.”
*Natasha Dow Schüll, author of "Addiction by Design: Machine
Gambling in Las Vegas"*
“Computing Taste tells a fresh story in the increasingly
crowded scholarship on artificial intelligence and culture. It will
be immensely useful for those outside of computer science and
engineering who want to understand how people think and work in the
AI industry.”
*Jonathan Sterne, author of "Diminished Faculties," "MP3," and "The
Audible Past"*
"Seaver’s exquisite and essential book brings us into an expert
community aspiring to find the delicate balance between caring for
and controlling the sprawling phenomenon of taste. The
ethnographically engaging Computing Taste offers a complex
rendering of the makers of music recommendation systems who believe
that algorithms can predict and shape musical taste while also
wrestling with the reductive absurdity of such a claim. Seaver’s
theoretical creativity both pushes critical studies of technology
in new directions and makes this book a joy to read.”
*Lisa Messeri, author of "Placing Outer Space: An Earthly
Ethnography of Other Worlds"*
“Who are the programmers writing the music recommendation recipes
that structure so many of our auditory habits in these digital
days? How do these new taste makers script listeners into the
musical multiverses their algorithms create? Seaver brilliantly
tunes us to the cadences of these people’s works and lives,
decoding the mix of cosmologies, capital, and computation that
channel how and what we hear today.”
*Stefan Helmreich, author "Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in
the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond"*
“Perhaps there’s no accounting for taste, but as Seaver
demonstrates in Computing Taste, his resonant and resourceful
ethnography of music recommendation algorithms, musical taste can
indeed be counted and coded. By listening to the sociotechnical
dynamics of that translation process—the means by which aesthetic,
subjective, social, and situational choices are transcribed into
human-orchestrated algorithms—Seaver helps us appreciate not only
the myriad harmonic parts that music and machines play in our
personal and social lives, but also the many modes and contexts in
which we listen.”
*Shannon Mattern, author of "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban
Intelligences"*
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