Computing Taste

Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

Nick Seaver

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English

University of Chicago Press
27 January 2023

Music: styles & genres; Algorithms & data structures

Meet the people who design the algorithms that capture our musical tastes.

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.

Computing Taste rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

By: Nick Seaver
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 254g
ISBN: 9780226822976
ISBN 10: 0226822974
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 27 January 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. He is coeditor of Towards an Anthropology of Data.

Reviews for Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

Computing Taste tells a fresh story in the increasingly crowded scholarship on artificial intelligence and culture. It will be immensely useful for those outside of computer science and engineering who want to understand how people think and work in the AI industry. -- Jonathan Sterne, author of Diminished Faculties, MP3, and The Audible Past