In this video, that I suggest you watch after you’re done with the last two minutes left in this article, I learned that Hayao Miyazaki, the mastermind behind films such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, believes stories should be told by interactions and not through dialogue. To him, dialogue is simply making explicit the emotions carefully imbued in the scene. To do this, he creates entire scenes before adding any dialogue. This means the viewer should know what’s happening just by the way the characters act, scenery, etc. Knowing this, we can see that there’s usually a lot more context around a conversation than just the spoken words. This is why just trying to analyse text will never be 100% accurate, there is an entire world of context outside the few lines a song contains and not observing it will lead us nowhere.

Second & Third Stage

With this current discovery I have a feeling I might face the same challenge with determining a tune’s emotions. That’s why I’m going back to the drawing board with this one and try to approach this as an emotional problem and not just a technological one.

Since you’ve read this far, if you feel like helping in any way please let me know! Any piece of advice I can get will likely get me closer to my goal!

Lesson learned

As @Mikettownsend said, “Machine learning is like highschool sex. Everyone says they do it, nobody really does, and no one knows what it actually is”. After this little side project, this was the first thing that came to mind.

It was enlightening when I noticed the error in the way I tackled this problem. I was focusing entirely on the final product and saw everything at my disposal as a tool to be used. Machine learning should be approached with dedication and care since it’s not a tool but rather a whole new paradigm to solve a diverse set of problems. Maybe once this relatively new field matures more we can start using certain areas as tools in the form of easy to use APIs, like Watson or one of the hundred tweet analyser out there. But until then we will have to roll up our sleeves and get deep in the machine.

The point of this article is making public my efforts and hoping someone with real experience might be inclined to shed some light into this issue. Please don’t be shy and leave a comment, I’m a definite newbie in such a fascinating field and I’m a firm believer that there’s wisdom in any nugget of knowledge or criticism. Also, I invite you to follow me for tech related articles. I’ve wanted to write about my experiences for a while now and this is just the start. I just chose a very complicated topic that I don’t quite grasp to begin with because I’m obviously very wise!

Note: I purposely chose to keep the “tech talk” light on this article to make it readable by a broader audience. I believe this is a highly conceptual problem it would be beneficial to have different types of minds on it.

Reading list

In case you’re interested in reading some theory here’s a list of most of what I read during my little experiment. Bear in mind I didn’t finish every one of these papers since I could only spend a couple of days doing this.

Papers

Videos

If you want to learn about neural networks I highly recommend this video series: