Synthèse

An article in today’s Globe and Mail reports on a discovery by a Adrian North, a Professor in psychology at the University of Leicester who specializes in experimental aesthetics, that what music you listen to affects how you percieve the taste of your wine.

Which got me wondering whether a wine recommender system based on music preferences might not just be useful for recommending wine, but also for discovering facts about the human perceptual apparatus. Ditto, perhaps, for books and food or for DVDs and soft-drinks? Perhaps Pepsi should merge with Warner Brothers?

The Globe article reports that:

Over all, the music shifted the perception of the wine in the direction of the music’s mood by an average of 37.25 per cent. The average for white wine was 32.25 per cent and for red 42.25 per cent.

Here are some suggestions from Chilean winemaker Aurelio Montes on what music to listen to as you drink.

CABERNET SAUVIGNON: All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix; Honky-Tonk Woman by The Rolling Stones; Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney; Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who.

CHARDONNAY: Atomic by Blondie; Rock DJ by Robbie Williams; What’s Love Got to do With It by Tina Turner; Spinning Around by Kylie Minogue.

SHIRAZ: Puccini’s Nessun Dorma as sung by Luciano Pavarotti; Orinoco Flow by Enya; Chariots of Fire by Vangelis; Canon by Johann Pachelbel.

MERLOT: Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding; Easy by Lionel Ritchie; Over The Rainbow by Eva Cassidy; Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez.

I considered attending the Semantic Technology Conference later on this month, but the $1,800 registration fee seemed a bit steep. Judging from the wide variety of presentations in the program (note the cool “customized schedule” feature), “semantic” is still a very ambiguous word.

For some, e.g. Yahoo Open Search, “semantics”, in the context of the web, really means “information rich” and “annotated”. Which is incredibly useful, but is it really “semantics”?

The Wikipedia defines semantics as “the study of meaning in communication”. As I have indicated in a previous post I like the formal definition of “semantics for X” wherein expressions in a language have “models” that “satisfy” those expressions (it’s interesting to note that the formal theory of semantics for RDF is couched in just this model-theoretic way.)

Perhaps there’s a way of reconciling the “we’re merely adding tags to data” sense of semantics and the “formal model theory for a language” sense. For instance Tags (names) and tag-types could be viewed as a kind of formal model that satisfies certain documents to which they are attached. Given the wide variety of uses for a given tag, I can see that this might be a field of application for paraconsistent logic.