ruohoruotsi/ruohoreviews

Generative Music Criticism

ruoho reviews

What

• What if Timbaland produced Stromae for Kompakt records?
• What if Taylor Swift & Theo Parrish fraternized to transcend the pedestrian screeching that beleaguers her pop balladry?
• What if Kanye indulged in tranquil, free-floating chorales?
• What if Flying Lotus teamed up with Tujiko Noriko to rescript pirouetting, melodic Zouglou.

These reviews are a creative writing experiment that (re)imagines an alternative musical cosmos where dissimilar musical expressions intermingle, unshackled by time, geography and class.

How

First-class criticism allows the reader to escape flatland, putting her in the front-row or inside the recording booth. But as a critic and writer:

• How do you reflect the spirit of the music?
• How do you avoid descriptive repetition?
• How do you keep 💩 fresh?

Who

As a label manager Ruoho Ruotsi wrote copy for artist profiles, featured releases, promo reviews, tweets, onesheets, blog posts & online commentary, amassing a prodigious collection of musical phrases, idiomatic expressions and colourful constructions.

These reviews are fashioned using Ruoho's probabilistic context-free grammar, RiTa and "hottt" artist charts pulled down from The Echo Nest.

As a regular reader of the Oxford American, Pitchfork, Boomkat, The Fader & The Wire, Ruoho hopes these reviews will dislodge writer's block, suggest new musical vistas, artist collaborations & even garner a few chuckles.

For connoisseurs & entertainment purposes only.

© 2014-2018 iroro orife.

ruohoreviews's Issues

Link Artist info to the Echotron

Link Artist info to the Echotron.
Eg. Radiohead == http://static.echonest.com/echotron/?id=ARH6W4X1187B99274F

Add Archives

Add separate page for archives, best-ofs and other choice output

Add Discogs integration

Add Discogs integration, for its motherload of actual Album titles that we can directly query. This is preferable to our crappy list of made up Album titles.

Fix image sizes for Tablet and phone CSS

Add datastructure to store grammatical artist attributes

Like gender, so we can he/she appropriately in the grammar expansion.
Ditto for solo artist versus a group. so we can "they" appropriately.

This came up in the context of the "They mean it maaan!" interjection that I recently added, which works great for a group but not a all for a solo artist where we'd want She or He means it maaan!

Fix Genre issues

Fix Genre issues:

• Add from the artist top-terms
• Make other random genres more readable, less parens and more readable, informative without being "too random", out-there.

Gracefully handle artist images not loading.

Gracefully handle artist images not loading.

This can happen if there is a broken link, or unclean data in the Echonest database. Instead of showing a broken link, test for existence and replace with a local/cached image of a silhouette or some other acceptable generic artist representation.

Trim size of rendered grammar outliers

Trim size of rendered grammar outliers to be more consistent. Outliers in length are hard to read and a bit ponderous. We want to shoot for short, sweet-n-juicy!

Remove hardcoded, CSS-breaking code

Remove hardcoded, CSS-breaking code in ruoho_reviews.html.

Move per rendering-size specializations into the respective javascript/css/style-mobile/desktop/desktop-1000(tablet).css file

Add support for Twitter artist "@artistname" instead of "Artist Twitter" link

Make <structure-description> more generative.

Make more generative. What I mean by that is make this tag, more capable to generating more variations.

1. Step one, refactor the adjectives.
2. Setup sub-structure descriptions based around nouns that especially work well with the nouns .... rather than a one adjective for all noun combinations.

Add support for artist listing based on location

This will give a more interesting and diverse set of artists:

Use:
http://static.echonest.com/demo/location/artist_location.html

Fix phone CSS (empty) side tab issue.

Add Bandcamp API support

Need to ensure you have a generic cache datastructure to flexibly hold services data!

Fix <artist-phrase> + dwarfs + <structure-description>

: The songwriting ... uses the word "dwarfs" which doesn't work with the .

One idea would be to partition the into two children nodes and have the artist-phrase only use the relevant child node.

Implement rate-limiting for better performance!

Explore:

• more sophisticated caching of API responses
• scalability and blacklist prevention! application-only auth?

Resources:
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting/1.1