"Democratic Party" - Music selection by the crowd...

The problem of how to choose the right music for a party has, until now, been a socio-cultural judgment on the part of the host. But now, as with so many other tasks in life, it can be offloaded onto technology - computer scientists at UCLA have designed a system which reads the playlists contained on partygoers' wifi-enabled MP3 players, and counts the songs and genres on those playlists as votes. As reported by NewScientist, the system "takes a poll of the titls to work out the most popular genre and can also copy and play back tracks from each [MP3] device. It can then play music from the most popular overall music genre or tracks supplier by each party-goer in turn." The particular promise of this system is that it'll enable party music to more effectively do its job - that is, to act as an ice-breaker and social lubricant. Since the system is playing those songs that the most attendees know, it's more likely to lead to the discovery that they have at least that song in common - then other things, then conversations, dating, marriage, babies... Yup, a good electronic DJ could make a big difference! [via Gizmodo]