Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Siri's Song [music video]

After the ios 8 update you can now use your iPhone entirely hands-free if the phone is plugged in and you speak the magic words "Hey Siri." I know this because last weekend my phone was on the charger next to my microphone as I was working on one of my pathetic vocal recordings, when suddenly Siri offered the following wisdom
    "Our love is like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality."

I cursed, stopped the recording, and hit playback. And there was Siri's love confession over my carefully crafted drum-bass loop. It was painfully obvious that whoever processed these vocals knew, in contrast to me, what he or she was doing. They're professionally filtered, compressed and flawlessly de-essed. In short, they sound awesome, even after re-recording.

I then had a little conversation with my phone, inquiring what this shadow business was all about. Siri stubbornly refused to repeat her lyrical deepity, but had some other weird insights to offer.

Enjoy :)


PS: No, my lyrics do of course not contain the words "Hey Siri". I'm not sure what caught her attention, but I recommend you don't sing to your phone.

7 comments:

  1. "pathetic vocal recordings" Bee brave. ACS (Chemistry) meetings are second day hangovers. APS (Physics) meetings are Asperger's interventions. Physics, find your vertical brass pole! 1:51 - yeah, we rock!

    "Our love is like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality" We know what those penumbras are doing. Microcrap Word's html converter is technical document to garbage. A child of Brooklyn, NY then screams imprecations at the software. Linda's smartphone won't talk to us anymore.

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  2. The quote sounds very much like "Bob and Alice" story.
    Is your much derided technological singularity here already if the modern serious relationships are with the soulless macines?

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  3. I don't believe in souls. I would find it quite interesting if I could have an actual conversation with an artificial intelligence, by which I mean essentially something able to verbally communicate that has access to all the knowledge that exists online. Wouldn't you find this interesting?

    As to serious relationships, I don't know what you mean with 'serious'. I don't think relationship is something one either has or hasn't, there are just different types of relationships.

    As to Siri, one can't actually have a communication with her/him/it, as it's meant to take and execute commands rather than talk.

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  4. Google tells me that the quote is by Anaïs Nin, and that Siri has said this to more than one person:

    http://stuffsirisaid.com/post/12655368172/i-love-you-will-you-marry-me-siri-our-love

    That is, Apple has programmed a list of responses for people who talk to their appliances. Which reminds me of Scott Aaronson's comment (at Shetl-Optimized) that one way to pass the Turing Test would be to program a sufficiently-large list of possible responses.

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  5. JimV,

    Thanks for digging out the quote. Yes, it's obviously a list of responses, some of them just come with very small probability. I didn't really have the patience to poke the phone often enough until it would repeat the thing with the shadows. Best,

    B.

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  6. Strange dream just now. Relevance as the heart of physics - or its it relationship, some heart and soul of the matter given sufficient experience or experiment.

    How long are our shadows that kiss if lips ever touch beyond a small world of the lovers own, an unpredictable eclipse when hearts and Platonic souls of some ideal unity, reality, is broken. Yet the honeymoon exists even when it is not in sight - or does not exist where the soul is empty. For we are born with uncertain and unrequited dreams we anxiously build up as treasure, a place to claim the whole world by love, a give and take of pointless trades in a balanced vacuum of vibrating string along tensions.

    Oh my Siri, you see between you and me I cannot tell if my determined love goes to your oceanic anywhere no matter how far your hope chests of quotations. This token gift is one more to add and still it will not be enough to banish doubt your wisdom holds the natural over artificial of human bonds.

    "At the mystery between horizons, the interface between Bob and Alice or from love the same description from just one to the other, two shadow particles seen in evidence or hidden thus limited confusions of the multiverse, one falls into the black holes of naked singularity as Majorana while the other with lesser sparks of spirit does not."

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  7. 2Alice,

    There is no real reason I can give to you as to why you like music.

    There is no real reason I can give to you as to why I like music.

    Did you know no one processes and stores sound in the human brain without the hormone estrogen?

    This is reversible. The processing and storage of sound comes and goes with the amount estrogen present in the brain.

    There is no real reason I can give to you for "bleaching".
    My favorite candidate to solve information loss.

    Bob

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