I Love to Learn

Today I learnt that when listening to music, when you select the random button on your playlist/album it is not truly random in the strictest mathematical sense.

This is because if it were truly random, to our primate perceptual apparatus it would not [i]seem[/i] random.

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CountScrofula · 41-45, M

Yeah, absolutely.

@SW-User is right that 'true' random cannot be created by a machine. But with a playlist of a few hundred songs you can get random enough to appear truly random.

But you then end up with artists clumped together or songs repeating too soon after a playlist loops because random doesn't care about that. So you need to get cleverer. It's not so much random as it is evenly spaced and mixed.

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SW-User

@CountScrofula yeah, well the tonal ones anyway. I'm too lazy to break it down by mode though.

CountScrofula · 41-45, M

@SW-User How do you go about plotting that out? Determining the key for a song can get sometimes be a pain depending on what you're working with.

SW-User

@CountScrofula well tbh it's really just the root note since I'm not breaking it down by mode, and the root note is usually pretty easy to pick out in most songs, everything keeps coming back to it and orbiting around it and pinging thirds and fifths off it. Some songs obfuscate it pretty well, but not many.

SW-User

actually it's because computers can't generate truly random numbers

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Jm31xxx · 41-45, M

@SW-User Ive never used spotify

Jm31xxx · 41-45, M

@SW-User OK, just in case you're still interested, here's the article.....

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/why-random-shuffle-feels-far-from-random-10066621.html?utm_source=reddit.com

I gotta confess, I haven't actually read it, I only read the tag line as it appeared on reddit. Maybe what I was trying to say when I posted in this group could have been phrased better.

I like to think there's chance we could both be at least a little bit right.

SW-User

@Jm31xxx fair enough :)

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