Comments, suggestions, and questions brought up during the Dana Centre presentations
Soundbite
DJs want a more rhythm-centric version, perhaps w/ BPM
create a playlist that goes from song A to song B over the course of a playlist (several requests for this)
Soundbite does not work on Vista (2 reports of it not working, 1 report of it working)
More control options for creating playlists - this was interesting and it occurred to me, anyone keen enough to download and install the software would probably also be keen to do some parameter tweaking...
Make Soundbite for other platforms - Winamp, MS Media Player, Songbird, etc.
Someone in every single group asked, "How do SB playlists compare to Last.fm/Pandora playlists?" and there seemed to be some expectation that there would a formal comparison of sorts (which I tried to explain is really difficult/impossible)
Sonic Visualiser (also MATCH/Vect, and "SoundBite segmentation plugin")
We had a fair bit of muffled appreciation, not so many concrete suggestions or comments -- perhaps we showed too many different things at once or did so too confusingly
Some thought the alignment method would be useful in a studio tool (for comparing and cut/pasting among takes). I know that others have shown interest in this in the past as well
Some interest in live beat-tracking for DJs etc, and although we were only showing an "offline" method, we had a bit of discussion about the possibilities & limitations & mentioned some of the other work being done at C4DM
I was asked whether I thought these visualisation techniques might be helpful in working with amusic people, by someone starting on a project about amusia at Goldsmith's -- unfortunately I failed to get her name -- I think she may be intending to talk to Ben because he's "local"
Semantic web (GNAT/GNARQL, and DBpediaMobile? with the DBtune wrappers)
We had really good feedback and interaction overall, apart from the first group that we kind of "lost" I guess.
One person in each group expressed concerns about "wrong" information that you may get. I answered by stating that it is the same when you want to read news - you go to a particular web-site. In a semantic web context, it is the same: you always get your information from somewhere.
We had twice the question "But, is it specific to music?"
Questions about fingerprinting, and GNAT in general - how can you relate an audio file to the corresponding web identifier?
One "But, doesn't Amazon do all that already?" - I answered that, even if Amazon has a lot of useful editorial information, it could benefit to link to other information sources.
One question about scale, how many "facts" are on the web already?
Two people wondered whether we had to enter tag manually, for the browsing-by-tag-in-GNARQL demo. Good opportunity to introduce that, no, they come from many different places.