The Original Beat: An Electronic Music Production System and Its Design

The barrier to entry in electronic music production is high. It requires expensive, complicated software, extensive knowledge of music theory and experience with sound generation. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are the main tools used to piece together digital sounds and produce a complete song. While these DAWs are great for music professionals, they have a steep learning curve for beginners and they must run native on a user’s computer. For a novice to begin creating music takes much more time, eort, and money than it should. We believe anyone who is interested in creating electronic music deserves a simple way to digitize their ideas and hear results. With this idea in mind, we created a web based, co-creative system to allow beginners and pros alike to easily create electronic digital music. We outline the requirements for such a system and detail the design and architecture. We go through the specifics of the system we implemented covering the front-end, back-end, server, and generation algorithms. Finally, we will review our development time-line, examine the challenges and risks that arose when building our system, and present future improvements

Toward an Algebraic Theory of Systems

We propose the concept of a system algebra with a parallel composition operation and an interface connection operation, and formalize composition-order invariance, which postulates that the order of composing and connecting systems is irrelevant, a generalized form of associativity. Composition-order invariance explicitly captures a common property that is implicit in any context where one can draw a figure (hiding the drawing order) of several connected systems, which appears in many scientific contexts. This abstract algebra captures settings where one is interested in the behavior of a composed system in an environment and wants to abstract away anything internal not relevant for the behavior. This may include physical systems, electronic circuits, or interacting distributed systems. One specific such setting, of special interest in computer science, are functional system algebras, which capture, in the most general sense, any type of system that takes inputs and produces outputs depending on the inputs, and where the output of a system can be the input to another system. The behavior of such a system is uniquely determined by the function mapping inputs to outputs. We consider several instantiations of this very general concept. In particular, we show that Kahn networks form a functional system algebra and prove their composition-order invariance. Moreover, we define a functional system algebra of causal systems, characterized by the property that inputs can only influence future outputs, where an abstract partial order relation captures the notion of "later". This system algebra is also shown to be composition-order invariant and appropriate instantiations thereof allow to model and analyze systems that depend on time

Causal Boxes: Quantum Information-Processing Systems Closed under Composition

Complex information-processing systems, for example quantum circuits, cryptographic protocols, or multi-player games, are naturally described as networks composed of more basic information-processing systems. A modular analysis of such systems requires a mathematical model of systems that is closed under composition, i.e., a network of these objects is again an object of the same type. We propose such a model and call the corresponding systems causal boxes. Causal boxes capture superpositions of causal structures, e.g., messages sent by a causal box A can be in a superposition of different orders or in a superposition of being sent to box B and box C. Furthermore, causal boxes can model systems whose behavior depends on time. By instantiating the Abstract Cryptography framework with causal boxes, we obtain the first composable security framework that can handle arbitrary quantum protocols and relativistic protocols.Comment: 44+24 pages, 16 figures. v3: minor edits based on referee comments, matches published version up to layout. v2: definition of causality weakened, new reference

The Differences between Recommender Technologies in their Impact on Sales Diversity

Recommender systems are frequently used as part of online shops to help consumers browse through large product offerings by recommending those products which are the most relevant for them. Although consumers’ interactions with recommender systems have been subject to substantial research, it is still unclear what the effect on aggregated sales diversity is, i.e. whether this leads to predominance of fast-selling or niche products. It is also unclear, whether any potential effects would differ between specific recommender technologies. We created a realistic web-experiment to monitor consumer behavior while purchasing digital music tracks when different recommender technologies are present. To analyze potential changes in sales diversity we used the Gini coefficient as well as additional measures. We found that sales diversity increases for all recommender technologies, except for bestseller lists. Furthermore, the differences across recommender technologies are rather small. Our findings have significant implications for online retailers and for producers

Instrumentalising Dignity to Govern Digital Ethics: Towards a Unified View

The potential ethical issues of their digital products and services for consumers represent a challenge for many companies. Above obeying the laws, stakeholders expect companies also to consider any ethical ramifications of their products and services. Companies have responded by establishing different digital ethics governance approaches, such as ethics boards, new specialist roles, or extended responsibilities for compliance officers. However, criticism holds that all approaches may only be “ethics washing”, lacking the effectiveness to influence product and service design effectively. An informed response requires a unified view to judge the effectiveness of digital ethics governance approaches on digital product and service design. We hold that dignity is the missing link to connect ethical governance approaches with their effects on the operational level. We, therefore, provide the CAGE Framework (Claims, Affronts, Governance, Effects) for dignity, which details the organisational lifecycle for effective digital ethics governance

Facilitating Consumers’ Evaluation of Experience Goods and the Benefits for Vendors

Despite the continuous growth of e-commerce, high levels of uncertainty about products and vendors may hinder this growth. Particularly online vendors of experience goods (such as media products) may face challenges to convince consumers, since the quality of their products is hard to assess prior to consumption. Additional guarantees (such as a money back guarantee) as well as easier access to product information may be used to reduce consumer uncertainty. However, these mechanisms are usually not for free. By using experimental techniques and taking media products as an example, we analyze whether reductions in product uncertainty and search costs have an impact on consumer product search and purchase behavior. As an implication for praxis as well as research, we find that vendors can benefit significantly from employing these mechanisms in terms of search requests, purchases and consumer loyalty. Additionally, vendors may profit from consumers’ uncertainty avoidance even if product uncertainty is low

Information provision measures for voice agent product recommendations— The effect of process explanations and process visualizations on fairness perceptions

While voice agent product recommendations (VAPR) can be convenient for users, their underlying artificial intelligence (AI) components are subject to recommendation engine opacities and audio-based constraints, which limit users’ information level when conducting purchase decisions. As a result, users might feel as if they are being treated unfairly, which can lead to negative consequences for retailers. Drawing from the information processing and stimulus-organism-response theory, we investigate through two experimental between subjects studies how process explanations and process visualizations—as additional information provision measures—affect users’ perceived fairness and behavioral responses to VAPRs. We find that process explanations have a positive effect on fairness perceptions, whereas process visualizations do not. Process explanations based on users’ profiles and their purchase behavior show the strongest effects in improving fairness perceptions. We contribute to the literature on fair and explainable AI by extending the rather algorithm-centered perspectives by considering audio-based VAPR constraints and directly linking them to users’ perceptions and responses. We inform practitioners how they can use information provision measures to avoid unjustified perceptions of unfairness and adverse behavioral responses

MEDIA MEETS RETAIL – RE-EVALUATING CONTENT QUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF B2C E-COMMERCE

In the increasingly competitive Internet business landscape, content is more and more employed for marketing purposes. While online retailers are raising investments in content to promote their online shops, media companies are starting to monetize their content by building own e-commerce platforms. The rationale behind these content-driven commerce approaches is to create a satisfying online shopping experience and, thus, to foster customer loyalty. However, whether content is a suitable means to these ends has not yet been proven. One obstacle is that there is no measurement instrument that captures all relevant characteristics of content on a website. We seek to fill this gap by developing a unified content quality scale in the context of B2C e-commerce. In this paper, we report on the first two of five steps in the scale development process and provide an initial proposal for a formativeformative second-order content quality construct. In contrast to previous measures, our scale considers hedonic characteristics of content and thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the concept. Furthermore, both media companies and online retailers can benefit from this scale by applying it to evaluate the effects of their content-driven commerce approaches on customer satisfaction and loyalty