Shuffle

[nekosensei]

Putting my ipod on shuffle while I'm driving or walking is entertaining. Many days, it seems like it picks an artist and plays a not insignificant number of songs by that artist. It tends to gravitate a lot towards Simon & Garfunkel and Tom Petty. Yesterday, it had a thing for Don Henley and David Bowie. Today, it was Fleetwood Mac.

[Edit: It looks like I'm not the only person who noticed this phenomenon].

Comments

Funny how that works

[jlindquist.livejournal.com]

Last year, the shuffler in iTunes, which I use for between-innings music during Poway baseball games, had a major thing for ZZ Top. It's like Steve is trying to tell you who he wants you to hear.

Randomness is clumpy

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

Reading the article you linked to...

Wow. Bad, bad stats. I am thoroughly unconvinced.

I don't like pulling the "I'm an expert" card (Ph.D. in cognitive psychology), but the apparent non-randomness of iPod's shuffle does fit with a very common result in cognitive psychology: Human brains are so good at noticing patterns that they notice patterns that aren't actually there or aren't significant. "Random" doesn't mean "completely homogeneous", it simply means "affected only by chance"-- and randomness is sometimes "clumpy". What would be odd is if there were no "clumps" at all.

(More details upon request.)

Re: Randomness is clumpy

[emygination.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you.

You can actually set the degree of randomness in the iTunes user setting -- it ranges from extra-clumpy to clumpless.

It's hard for human brains to recognize that truly random means that all data points are determined completely independently from each other. I know this, and still I have trouble wrapping my brain around it. ;)

Re: Randomness is clumpy

[limuh.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Human mind has tendency to seek correlations, irrelevant of there actually being any or not. This indiscriminate love for correlations (bogus ones included) gives us a whole lot of problems (see: stereotypes, superstitions and other such), but it must've been good for our survival.

Still.. it's kind of amusing to think my music player has a music taste all of its own. Gives it character ;)