Category — Industry & Commerce

As I've mentioned or alluded to in a few of my posts in the past couple of months, I've recently been working on a new talk for 2010. The talk is entitled 'Hearing Pictures' and is based around my work on a side hobby called 'Project Ludi'.

It's a little difficult to explain the long-term mission of Project Ludi in a short blog post, but in the first series of experiments on which I've honed in, I am seeking to create a system that can translate pictures into music. This is what I call the Synesthesizer -- a musical synthesizer that relies on synesthesia-inspired translation metaphors.

I'm only a few short months into what is a very long-term endeavor, and I've had precious few hours to spend on the project in that time, but I always set the benchmark definition of version 1.0 of the synesthesizer as 'a system that produces something approximating music', and even though I haven't invested nearly the amount of time as I'd like, I believe that the current Synesthesizer meets this definition. And thus, I feel I have Synesthesizer 1.0.

The Synesthesizer is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music in real-time. What I've included with this post is a rendering of the output of the application -- not the Synesthesizer itself. I'll let you judge the quality for yourself -- and please feel free to let me know what you think.

Now, of course, there is far more to do here, but what I found most amazing about this process was how easy it was to get to a point of generating 'music' instead of 'sound'. In effect, I apply something along the order of six rules to get to this point. The addition of each rule to the Synesthesizer brings us closer to the generation of music, instead of raw sound.

To get a bit more insight into the Synesthesizer, you should check out my talk, Hearing Pictures, which I'll be presenting at FITC Amsterdam in February and at FITC Toronto in April.

In this talk, I describe the process I followed to get the Synesthesizer to this point. Using the 1943 Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass Bead Game (also published under the title Magister Ludi, the protagonist of the novel, from whom Project Ludi derives its name), as a starting point, and proceeding through a discussion of synesthesia, the aural illusions of Professor Diana Deutsch, the Experiments in Musical Intelligence by Professor David Cope, the music of Tamarin Monkeys, and many other stepping points, I walk through the thought process required to assume an odd endeavor such as the cross-modal translation of pictures into music.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Earlier this week, I caught this post from Matthew Yglesias, and it triggered me to think a bit more about this idea of the relationship of growth and innovation.

Considering the economic value of the printing press as being measurable solely through the economic activity of the publishing industry is obviously an overly narrow interpretation of economic impact -- and I'm not sure why he chooses to do that. You could make that argument with certain other types of innovations (such as a new book binding glue), the impact of which might be argued to be limited to the book publishing industry, but the printing press powered information sharing, documentation, communication, learning -- and, of course, commerce. It's like arguing the economic value of the internet can be measured solely through the economic activity of bloggers.

Externalities, such as in this printing press example, are not reflected in, or susceptible to audit through, objective economic indicators like GDP (on a macro level) or a firm's balance sheet (on a micro level). The inability of our economic system to track and account for externalities is, perhaps, the single largest flaw in our conception of economies. This is but one example. It does not mean the economic value does not exist -- it means that we can not objectively quantify the economic value of many different types of activities.

Secondly, however, the post does not account for society's ability to influence which activities are economically valuable. Societies (and economies) do this on their own through the aggregate decisions and output of many individual actors (the invisible hand, as it were), and cultures and governments can guide, foster, encourage or squelch these trends. Obviously, when a government invests in an interstate highway infrastructure, the traceable economic impact of Henry Ford's innovations skyrocket. So, the US government, through its allocation of funds and resources to support a specific activity, directly influenced the translation of innovation into economic value. Contemporarily, we see an example of private attempts to spur innovation in space travel with Ansari X Prize, and in the public sphere we have policies such as the one here in California granting the carpool-lane access to registered hybrid gas-electric automobiles to spur consumptions of Priii and Insights. We can choose to make it easier or harder for specific innovations (and the firms that pioneer their implementation in commerce) to prosper or fail in their attempts to translate innovation into value.

But, finally, we have the fact that any of this even needs to be stated. There is a syllogistic assumption in American commerce that:

a) growth fuels capitalism
b) capitalism fuels innovation
c) thus growth fuels innovation

Each of these three statements is obviously only partially true. Growth and innovation are not the same thing. Sometimes the interests of each come into conflict, and in American commerce, when they do -- which is often -- the need to grow or protect shareholder value almost always trumps the interests of innovation. And, as the evaluation horizon for these decisions affecting shareholder value becomes increasingly short-term, the tension between these forces only increases. You can make a solid argument that capitalism provides a sufficiently good spark for innovation, given its other benefits, or that it is the optimal spark to economically valuable innovations, but it is most definitely not the ideal system if the top goal is to foster innovation overall.

One of my favorite, if slightly cartoonish illustrations of this, is the 1951 film, The Man in the White Suit, the plot of which IMDB summarizes in a single sentence, 'An altruistic chemist invents a fabric that resists wear and stain as boon to humanity but both capital and labor realize it must be suppressed for economic reasons.' In short, the small factory town, which depends on the fabric mill for its livelihood, attempts to lynch a scientist for creating an indestructible suit -- a suit that would never require replacement -- thus negating the economic activity of the town and decimating the livelihoods of the citizens. Again, an extreme, cartoony example of what is a very real dynamic of often opposing forces.

Innovation costs money. Innovation carries risks. Certain innovations can reduce consumption. These are all quite contrary to the directives of business owners. Growth is a reliable path to making money. That's what a true capitalist wants.

This leads to something I've been wanting to post for a couple of weeks. A few years ago, a friend forwarded me a link to the infamous 'Microsoft Designs the iPod Package' video (which predated the release of the Zune by a year or so). The not-unbelievable result of the satire was to turn Apple's iconic packaging into:

Well, just recently I read that this video was actually produced in-house by Microsoft people. It was intended to spur innovation in the internal operation of the firm, not by lamenting or satirizing the pathetic nature of their packaging (which is what viewers like me assumed when we first saw the video, several years back), but instead, as Erik Peterson writes, to illustrate:

"None of the decisions shown in that video were made through incompetence or bad intentions. Microsoft hires the most talented, driven, highest-paid people in the world. It’s just that, as more and more people give their well-meant input, the combined effect is a boring, overloaded, unremarkable result."

So, in order to foster innovation at one of the world's largest and most valuable corporations, they produced this video.

And, one year later, when Microsoft produced the Zune, their package was the slickest, cleanest and coolest that the company had ever produced (even in comparison to the XBox).

Perhaps not an innovation along the lines of the printing press, but still a great example of how it is possible to innovate within large firms -- but the sparsity of examples indicates the degree of difficulty associated with fostering innovation, illustrating that growth and innovation are two separate forces. They are correlated forces, but they only sometimes act in concert, and sometimes they operate in direct opposition to one-another.