iPod Shuffle Feature

Here is the way the Apple iPod’s shuffle feature works:

Utilizing a vast database of information on your personal music preferences based on genre, track length, time of day and humidity, it creates a spreadsheet of possible track picks. It winnows through those selections and discards certain picks based on flow (how the intro of the potential new song will sound against the outro of the playing song), redundancy (too sonically similar to previous picks?), and whether or not it ought to be an old favorite or something with minimal spins.

At this juncture there are still a couple of hundred potential songs, depending on the size of your library, and so a tool developed by NASA for Apple is then utilized. It’s an incredibly advanced bit of AI in miniature. Put in layman’s terms, it imagines that you and it were really good friends and that you’d just gotten stoned together for the first time in awhile, and it imagines what you and it would most enjoy listening to—something that would blow your mind, as it were. It burrows through the remaining choices, deliberating with great accuracy and speed the potential emotional ramifications of its choice, and finally selects the absolute perfect song to play for that exact moment considering all of the space-age information it has on you and your current cerebral state.

Then it plays “Slow Hands” by Interpol for the second time that day. Fucking machines.