09.12.05 iTunes Signature Maker.
The dissemination of music as files has exponentially increased during the last years, creating a social phenomenon that has manifested itself in the form of hardware and software players. If the the former is a drastic evolution of the walkman, inflated of manageable musical information, the latter (iTunes as first) have slowly changed many of the physical media conventions in use, replacing them in the consumer society. iTunes Signature Maker by Jason Freeman analyzes (after user's permission), his library of tunes hosted in iTunes, and creates a sound 'signature' made out of very short samples of the most important tunes, basing on some customizable parameters. This ultra-synthetic profile of your own tastes is then saved on the hard disk and it is a sort of barcode of your own listenings. It is conceptually derived from the 'scanning' feature, technically introduced only with the compact discs to listen the first seconds of a track, and then evolved in the online files 'preview' (typically in streaming). This synthesis represent an arbitrary essay of the private acoustic selections, making a collage out of some scraps taken from our own sound memory. It's automatic and unfinished, nevertheless it always represents the involved person.