Category: Sci/Tech

by Kate Haas-

With artificial intelligence becoming a hot topic across various industries, Spotify’s new AI-powered DJ has raised concerns about the future of music streaming platforms.

As a leading music streaming service, Spotify attributes its success to one major hallmark: they provide a personalized music experience for users. By partnering with the company that owns the ubiquitous ChatGPT, OpenAI and Spotify launched one of the most personalized features for Premium users. 

This new feature, currently only available in the United States and Canada, creates a unique radio station for each listener based on past favorites, recent repeats and new recommendations.

In between each song, the AI-powered host, DJ X, provides commentary about different artists and tracks using a generated, realistic-sounding radio voice.

DJ X also updates commentary each month to include cultural references during song breaks. In honor of Women’s History Month, DJ X has been recommending users listen to the playlist  “Women of Pop Throughout the Ages.” 

The goal of the new feature, explained Spotify, is for the platform to get to know listeners well enough for the DJ to choose what to play with the click of a single button. Or, as Spotify said in their press release, it’s putting an “AI DJ in your pocket.” 

How do other online music streaming services plan to compete with Spotify by integrating AI into their own systems? Will AI change the future of the music business? Experts within the industry have their own responses to these burning questions. 

“I think that we’ll see other platforms attempt to integrate AI into their systems in unique ways – maybe YouTube Music will implement AI searching or Pandora will try to create AI talk shows,” said Artem Bank, an esteemed audio engineer and professor of audio technology at Virginia Tech. “I think for any service, AI integration is the buzzword right now, just as ‘algorithm’ was for search relevance not too long ago.”

Bank said there are several dangers that arose when Spotify merged AI with music. 

The priorities of Spotify’s version of AI focus on data sets of popularity. This means when DJ X is recommending artists for a user to listen to, popular artists with a higher listener count will get priority over a smaller artist, even if the user listens to both. This specific piece of the algorithm could be threatening to smaller names trying to gain popularity on streaming platforms. 

“AI can replicate based on what it’s learned, but it struggles to create something brand new in terms of style and genre,” said Bank, the lead live audio engineer for the PBS series “Live at 9:30.” 

Bank also noted that until AI seeks to replace composers and songwriters as a whole, a major shift in the future of the music industry won’t happen. 

Although Spotify has taken the lead in integrating cutting-edge AI technology into their streaming service, the challenge for musicians to create unique and innovative sound becomes even more difficult amidst an evolving industry landscape.

by Thomas Mundy-

It has been several weeks since the spy balloon from the People’s Republic of China was shot down by a United States jetfighter and lots of controversy has been stirred since the beginning. 

What started out as an apparent weather balloon gone astray from The People’s Republic of China has thrown the public into a frenzy, when United States officials announced that there were instruments on the aircraft that were capable of sending intelligence back over to the controllers. Scientists like Ella Atkins, department head of aerospace and ocean engineering at Virginia Tech, said that this reaction seems a little overboard.

“People are overreacting to the data that could possibly have been collected by this one spy balloon,” Atkins said. “The reality is, we have satellites in low earth orbit from countries all over the world.” 

Airspace is more strict than what could be expected. A country owns the air above its country. This ownership leads all the way up to where the breathable atmosphere reaches non-breathable atmosphere according to Jamie McGrath, a retired Navy Captain involved in the Rice Center for Leader Development at Virginia Tech and the Corp of Cadets. 

“Primarily the airspace that we are talking about are spaces that air-breathing equipment can operate in, so think of airplanes,” McGrath said. “The airspace above a country is sovereign territory just like the land and then that sovereignty stretches out 12 nautical miles from the coastline.”

With this balloon, along with any other aircraft flying, it is required to gain permission from the country to fly over top of the territory according to McGrath. This is where the problems began for the balloon. Above the country, there are a plethora of flying objects moving through the atmosphere. Much of the things in the atmosphere are non-recognizable, like the bugs and birds that fly around. Then there is the man-made equipment sent out in the atmosphere, and if this equipment is not monitored, it can become hazardous to others in the same airspace according to Atkins. 

Currently, there have been multiple sightings of other alleged spy balloons. The major thought that Captain McGrath wants to get across is that, even though this seems to have turned into a foreign policy breach and national security issue, there are objects in the sky and in orbit around the Earth that are capable of this very incident, the only difference is that this balloon might have been able to stay in one spot longer than a passing satellite. 

“There are capabilities that fly over our nation and other nations, that I would say, are probably equal to, if not superior to, what could be hanging from a balloon,” McGrath said. “It might be able to loiter in a single location for a longer period of time, so instead of collecting information every time it passes overhead, it was potentially able to collect a larger volume of information while it was in one place.”