Posts
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Conductor Ideal Points, Part II
See part 1 here
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Conductor Ideal Points Part I
In a post last year I talked about the difference in musical preferences between the incoming New York Philharmonic music director, Jaap van Zweden, and his predecessor Alan Gilbert. There I simply compared counts of their most frequently performed composers. It gives you some idea of how they differ, but comparing plots of performance frequencies is cumbersome, especially if you want to compare multiple conductors and more than just their top 10 composers. In this post I apply ideal point modeling, from the pyschometrics and political science literature, to the problem of modeling conductor preferences. This approach allows for easy visualization of latent structure in conductor preferences.
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Terminal Reminders
This is for me, since I’ll forget. I was trying to install
tensorflowusingpipon MacOS Sierra and was having a hard time. After some googling, I found this apple.stackexchange post, and the response by Michal Prihoda suggests usingpip install --user <modulename> -
Topic Models for New York Philharmonic Programs
I have read about applications of topic models beyond text to things like genetic data and image data, but as far as I can tell there hasn’t been much work on topic modeling musical performance data. I think the performance program data from the New York Philharmonic archive is very amenable to topic modeling. For example you could think of the concerts as being documents, and the pieces performed as being words. Then assume a generative model that draws pieces from a topic-specific distribution of pieces conditional on a latent topic assignment variable, which is itself drawn from a concert-specific topic-distribution parameter.
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New York Philharmonic Conductors
In January the New York Philharmonic appointed Jaap van Zweden as its next music director. According to the various news and magazine articles about the announcement, van Zweden seems to be more inclined toward Beethoven, Brahms, and other classical music meat-and-potatoes composers compared to his current director Alan Gilbert.
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Topic Modeling the Daily Princetonian
One of my favorite ways to waste time is reading internet comments. You can observe all kinds of angry people there and wonder at their pathologies. While I was still in school I particularly enjoyed reading the comments section of the Daily Princetonian because of its relevance to me. Though I only worked for a brief time formatting the print edition of the paper, I got to know some of the journalists, opinion writers, and editors through that work and through classes. Writing for a college newspaper requires a thick skin; the commenters are almost always out to get you.