MoodLogic

Last updated October 13, 2019

MoodLogic was a software company founded in 1998 by Tom Sulzer, Christian Pirkner, Elion Chin and Andreas Weigend, and was one of the first online music recommendation systems.^[1] The company obtained ratings on over 1 million songs by over 50,000 distinct listeners as part of its proprietary method for modeling user preference space.

Andreas Sebastian Weigend is the former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com and the author of the book Data for the People. He is a member of Germany’s Digital Council "Digitalrat".

Software

In addition to their web presence, the company created a software application that uses a central database to allow users to collaboratively profile music by mood. Each user has a certain number of "credits" they can use to identify song profiles. Credits could be obtained by either paying for them or profiling songs.

Computer software, or simply software, is a collection of data or computer instructions that tell the computer how to work. This is in contrast to physical hardware, from which the system is built and actually performs the work. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data. Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own.

A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are often developed using formal design and modeling techniques.

This software allowed the user to generate "mood" based playlists based on the mood of the user. The program could also mix a playlist based on a selected song. This would return a playlist with songs of similar tempo, mood, genre, etc. The software was also capable of organizing a music collection based on a "fingerprint" of the song. Moodlogic would generate this fingerprint of the song, upload it to the server and wait for a response. This process could take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on computer power, internet connection speed and server load. Once the corrected tag information had been downloaded, the ID3 tag was updated and written to the file. This meant a user could have a collection of incorrectly tagged mp3's and the software would be able to correctly identify, tag, and even organize the songs into folders based on artist.

In musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece and is usually measured in beats per minute. In modern classical compositions, a "metronome mark" in beats per minute may supplement or replace the normal tempo marking, while in modern genres like electronic dance music, tempo will typically simply be stated in bpm.

In psychology, a mood is an emotional state. In contrast to emotions, feelings, or affects, moods are less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence. In other words, people usually talk about being in a good mood or a bad mood.

Genre is any form or type of communication in any mode with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. Genre is most popularly known as a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old ones. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility.

Patents

Chief Scientist Rehan Khan and his team filed a number of patents, 2 of which have currently been granted: US Patent 6539395 "Method for creating a database for comparing music" and US Patent 7277766 "Method and system for analyzing digital audio files." The latter patented a system for audio fingerprinting that was fast, compact and robust.

2006 buy-out

Despite a high-profile launch, and apparently active community, the website was short-lived. The last release of the software was on November 13, 2003, with version 2.7.1. The last official traffic on the forums was in late 2004. Repeated forum posts by users after that time resulted in no response, and inquiries from subscribers ceased to be answered, although the software database seemed to continue operating.

Moodlogic was bought by All Media Guide, the company that runs allmusic.com, in May 2006. It is not yet clear whether All Media intends to resume development and reactivate the community. Prominent employees and consultants to the company included musicologist Dr. Robert Gjerdingen, psychologist Daniel Levitin and record producer/e-music.com co-founder Sandy Pearlman.

Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is currently a professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas, as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology" of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory in 2009 and has become influential in the field of music theory. Gjerdingen was also editor of the journal Music Perception from 1998 to 2002.

Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. Levitin holds three academic appointments: he is James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is an Associate member in music theory, computer science, neurology and neurosurgery, and education; Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI; and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. From 2000 to 2017, he was Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill. An accomplished public speaker, his TED talk has been viewed more than 16 million times. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a fellow of the Psychonomic Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). He has appeared frequently as a guest commentator on NPR and CBC.

Samuel Clarke "Sandy" Pearlman was an American music producer, artist manager, music journalist and critic, professor, poet, songwriter, and record company executive. He was best known for founding, writing for, producing, or co-producing many LPs by Blue Öyster Cult, as well as producing important albums by The Clash, The Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, Space Team Electra, and Dream Syndicate; he was also the founding Vice President of eMusic.com. He was the Schulich Distinguished Professor Chair at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, and from August 2014 held a Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship at the Coach House Institute (CHI) of the University of Toronto Faculty of Information as part of the CHI's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

2008 move to Macrovision

The MoodLogic site resolves to Macrovision's site with this message:

"Effective March 3, 2008, Macrovision announces the end of life (EOL) of the Moodlogic music management and recommendation software. Service will be discontinued due to intensive operational and infrastructure resources are required to sustain the application. Macrovision’s efforts in music recommendation will continue through the AMG Data Services Tapestry business-to-business product."

2009 renaming to Rovi Corporation

On July 15, 2009, Macrovision Solutions Corporation was renamed Rovi Corporation. According to the company's website, "Rovi Corporation is focused on revolutionizing the digital entertainment landscape by delivering solutions that enable consumers to intuitively discover new entertainment from many sources and locations. The company also provides extensive entertainment discovery solutions for television, movies, music and photos to its customers in the consumer electronics, cable and satellite, entertainment and online distribution markets. These solutions, complemented by industry leading entertainment data, create the connections between people and technology, and enable them to discover and manage entertainment in its most enjoyable form.

Rovi holds over 4,000 issued or pending patents and patent applications worldwide [including those by MoodLogic], and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with numerous offices across the United States and around the world including Japan, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom."

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MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a compact disc metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.

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References

↑ Zisk, Brian (September 13, 2005). Recommendation Engines. Washington, D.C.

External links

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[1] Zisk, Brian (September 13, 2005). Recommendation Engines. Washington, D.C.