For this assignment, I decided to focus in on the grouping I was placed in by Palladio. Group 4, seen in the image above, had 3 other members: Megs, Aaron and Kelvin. There was only 1 song that all 4 of us chose that can be seen in the centre of the image. Tsuru No Sugomori or Crane’s Nest was our unifying choice and also a more popular pick that I would consider one of the top voted songs from the class.
Our grouping’s other most popular songs at 3 votes each were as follows:
- New Guinea, Men’s House Song
- Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance
- “Melancholy Blues,” Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven
- Australia, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird
The songs not chosen by any of our 4 group members:
- Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement
- Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers”
- Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song
- Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux”, Partita No. 3
- Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round”
- Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina
A trap one looking at the data could fall into would be to assume that the null choices in this scenario mean that songs with less votes are somehow of lesser importance. The data in Palladio in no way indicates why songs were chosen over others. That being said, I remember that when I completed the quiz, there were a small number of songs that I didn’t recognize at all. A classmate posted to our course section in Mattermost that they too had come across some songs they didn’t find familiar. Anyone from our class who listened to the playlist from the Golden Record on the imbedded youtube link missed out on a small number of songs (2) that may have otherwise been part of their curated list of 10. Those who listened to the Golden Record on another source such as Spotify had a slightly different 27 tracks they were presented with to choose from. As we learned in this week’s readings, because of algorithms not every potential path in the network has the same likelihood to be followed. If class members typed in “golden record soundtrack” to a search engine, they would be given options that were not all identical. Right from the start, the information that was being collected from us had a major flaw in that we didn’t all engage with the same playlist.
