Engineering culture: logics of optimization in music, games, and apps

Abstract

This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their content for optimal circulation on multiple platforms. Through comparative cases of music, games, and apps that draw on trade press and industry discourse, institutional and financial analysis, and select interviews with musicians, we consider various forms of, and strategies for, what we call cultural optimization. We draw on these instances to better understand the similarities and differences in the optimization of cultural content and metadata for economic or cultural gains. We hope our comparative approach reveals different conceptions of the term optimization, and that this term-in all its digital, financial, and cybernetic connotations-might prompt new ways of thinking about the interactions between content, (meta)data, platforms, and culture that have long shaped the circulation of cultural goods.

The Composition System of Pop Music Movement Based on Finite Element Differential Equations

“…( , ) n x y represents additive noise [8]. The total variational regularization model replaces its 2 L norm with the 1 L gradient norm. At this point we have…”

“…In this paper, an algorithm for converting images into music is established based on finite element differential equations [2]. We use digital images captured or stored in electronic devices as composition material to provide children with inspiration and motivation for composition.…”