Computing Taste

Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation

Computing Taste
Nick Seaver
RRP:
NZ$ 37.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 30.39
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 224pg
6 Dec 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226822976
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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.
"Seaver' s nimble account of how contemporary music recommendation systems are conceived and crafted takes readers beyond easy oppositions of humans and algorithms to explore the captivating dynamics of taste and technics, hearing and computing, guidance and coercion. " -- Natasha Dow Schull, author of "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" "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" "Seaver' s exquisite and essential book brings us into an expert community aspiring to find the delicate balance between caring for and controlling the sprawling phenomenon of taste. The ethnographically engaging Computing Taste offers a complex rendering of the makers of music recommendation systems who believe that algorithms can predict and shape musical taste while also wrestling with the reductive absurdity of such a claim. Seaver' s theoretical creativity both pushes critical studies of technology in new directions and makes this book a joy to read. " -- Lisa Messeri, author of "Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds" "Who are the programmers writing the music recommendation recipes that structure so many of our auditory habits in these digital days? How do these new taste makers script listeners into the musical multiverses their algorithms create? Seaver brilliantly tunes us to the cadences of these people' s works and lives, decoding the mix of cosmologies, capital, and computation that channel how and what we hear today. " -- Stefan Helmreich, author "Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond" "Perhaps there' s no accounting for taste, but as Seaver demonstrates in Computing Taste, his resonant and resourceful ethnography of music recommendation algorithms, musical taste can indeed be counted and coded. By listening to the sociotechnical dynamics of that translation process-the means by which aesthetic, subjective, social, and situational choices are transcribed into human-orchestrated algorithms-Seaver helps us appreciate not only the myriad harmonic parts that music and machines play in our personal and social lives, but also the many modes and contexts in which we listen. " -- Shannon Mattern, author of "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences"
Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. He is coeditor of Towards an Anthropology of Data.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226822976
Published: 6 Dec 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 224

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information