Relational Music Matching

February 12, 2003

My web wanderings have come up with quite a bit of interesting detritus related not only to music but to meta-music as well!

MusicBrainz is attempting to create a database of metadata (a “metadatabase” if you will) regarding music. Artist name, album name, track name and number, all that stuff. This is territory well covered by the likes of freedb and Gracenote’s CDDB (otherwise known as el Diablo), but it differs in a couple of interesting ways. The folks at MusicBrainz have developed a program called a tagger to help people clean up and maintain the metadata of their MP3 libraries. The tagger uses Relatable’s audio fingerprinting technology TRMTM in combination with the MusicBrainz database to try and determine the metadata of each song by actually listening to it. I’m not sure how accurate this is as I have yet to try it, but let’s just say I’m eager.

The MusicBrainz about page also mentions something about relating artists in the database as a means of finding new music. This is something I’m very interested in. I have been looking for a good reputation engine for music, a service which would allow me to search for an artist, see other users who also like that artist, see how the community has rated their taste in music, and then see what other bands they enjoy. So far, there’s not much going on in this respect. The paradox of the web, in which popularity kills small projects, prevents a service like this from really flourishing without drowning itself in subscriptions or blinking banner ads.

Enter our next contestant. Audioscrobbler (down as of this posting due to said paradox) is taking this concept in a novel direction. Starting as just a WinAmp plugin, with other platforms and players to follow, you start building a relational music database just by listening to your music while connected to the Internet. With the site being down, I can’t really post more details at this time.

In other news, another post about turntable music, this one about a class on the subject at Berklee College of Music, has turned MetaFilter into a frothing-at-the-mouth bar brawl with the This Signals The End Of Music crowd on one side, the You Wouldn’t Know Good Music If It Was Coming Out Your Ass crowd on the other and the Can’t We All Just Get Alongs whimpering softly in the corner.

* Posted at 4:19 pm.
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Overdose

February 6, 2003

Making the rounds on blog circuit is a story about Brandon Vedas and his lethal overdose while chatting on IRC. Brandon was 21 and took a cocktail of prescription drugs, as well as marijuana and alcohol, which could have killed a horse. During the course of the chat Brandon updated everyone present on the drugs he was taking. An administrator of the chat was updating the channel’s title to reflect this list. The drugs included:

  • 80 mg Methadone
  • 120 mg Restoril
  • 40 mg Klonopin 1
  • 160 mg Inderal
  • 1.5 grams high-grade marijuana
  • 4 grams low-grade marijuana
  • Unspecified amount of 151 proof alcohol

Most of the drugs in the above list have a depressant affect on the central nervous system. When taken together this affect can be greatly magnified, causing asphyxiation and/or cardiac arrest. Many of the people in the chat with Brandon probably knew this. Many of them could recognize the drugs by name.

This gets right to the heart of what bothers me the most about this man’s death: he was in a chat room filled with people with non-trivial knowledge of drugs and their affects on the nervous system and no one would take action to save him. Granted, there were a few major obstacles to getting help to this person. It is unclear if anyone in the chat knew him personally. Prior to ingesting his bounty of pharmaceuticals he broadcasted his cell phone number, but the only other item of information available was his web site address, klonopinz.com.

But these were not the major sticking points in saving this young man. The people in the chat bickered back and forth about whether or not to call 911. They feared that Brandon, as well as themselves, could land in serious trouble if the authorities were called. Someone suggested poison control. Poison control told them they should call 911 immediately, but they continued to fret over this. All the while a few members of the chat were actively trying to get Brandon to take more drugs, to show how “hardcore” he was.

[04:12] <Smoke2k> you pussy
[04:12] <Smoke2k> you pussy
[04:12] <Smoke2k> eat more

That is from a person who might have actually known Brandon personally, and who was talking to him on his cell phone. In the end, when it started to look like Brandon was in real trouble, this person fled:

[05:22] <Smoke2k> might not want to do that [call 911]
[05:22] <Smoke2k> but then again I don’t know
[05:22] <Smoke2k> he might just be fucked up and not have stuff straight
[05:22] <Smoke2k> you could really fucking get him arrested
[05:22] <Smoke2k> damn this is hard call
[05:22] <Smoke2k> yall make it
[05:22] <Smoke2k> good night
[05:22] * Smoke2k has quit IRC (Leaving: )

The people in that chatroom may have brought more trouble down upon themselves by not calling 911 than if they had actually done so. They may have been able to save Brandon’s life. An enterprizing chatter did a WHOIS search on Brandon’s domain and got a physical address. They did not know if this was his actual home address, but it was a start.

Would you know what to do if you were in a similar situation, or if you had someone overdosing right in front of you? Have you played breathe: the overdose game yet? When I was first reading the chat logs of this incident, I started getting worried as soon as I saw that he listed more than one CNS depressant. Then he kept piling on the drugs. I was shocked at how long it took these people to start wondering if he was doing too much.

The IRC channel that Brandon was in is called #shroomery, and it is an offshoot of The Shroomery, a web site about psilocybin mushrooms and other drugs. He was surrounded by people with better-than-average knowledge of drugs and they were unable or unwilling to act in time to save him.

A little knowledge can go a long way in helping others as well as yourself. If you are experimenting with drugs, or are hanging out with people who are, it is important to be educate yourself. The War on (Some) Drugs has done a pretty decent job of hampering the public’s ability to edutcate itself about potentially dangerous drugs, but accurate information is available. Any one of the following sites should be of great assistance to anyone looking to know more about chemicals which are easily available to anyone with the desire to acquire them:

1 Brandon mentioned different amounts of Klonopin throughout the chat. It seems as if he was adding more of the drug to the cocktail because he wasn’t noticing the affects quickly enough. He mentions 8mg twice, and then 24mg. 24mg may have been the final total.

* Posted at 4:53 pm.
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