Opinion | Can AI teach you to have better music taste? Listen to Beethoven, Tupac and K-pop, the bots told me
- I asked AI to curate a crash course in musical improvement – and it told me jazz and indie rock are the most tasteful genres in the universe
When my daughter and her friends were 11, I had terrible taste in music. To be clear, this was not my perception.
It is true that I couldn’t have defined “good music”. I believed I had an eclectic taste, across genres and eras. That is, I knew what I liked.
That wasn’t good enough. And even if I did my best to appreciate teen pop, the boundaries of taste constantly shifted. I remained outside, like Tantalus in the Greek myth, reaching towards branches of fruit that recoil from his grasp.
Once, asked to choose my favourite music to accompany a book reading, I enlisted a DJ friend to select the tracks. I couldn’t possibly narrow down 80 gazillion songs into a 90-minute playlist. He could. The music was in fine taste, no thanks to me.
That was then, and this is the Information Age, where we have instant access to the entirety of human knowledge and history.
Seeking musical self-improvement, I turned to artificial intelligence. Its task: give me musical taste. Popular, trouble-free, time-saving, face-saving.
