Sound Of Style: Sensing Beyond Human Perception
It is amazing to look at different human senses and learn from their interplay, for example, the visual and hearing. The seed for this edit occurred when I was reading a blog from StitchFix which conducts industry-leading personalization experiments. One of the challenging problems in fashion is to identify the style or taste of a consumer. Traditional ways to accomplish this is to use domain experts (Stylists) to look at what makes a good look and what does not. This is not scalable when you have lots of consumer and product touchpoints that are highly distributed. Stitchfix is leading the way in figuring out ways of solving this problem. This is fundamental to personalization at the level of One. In this edit, We bring you how Color, one of the dimensions of Style, can be perceived through sound and go to an extent of getting beyond human perception.
The greatest of innovations happen under constraint. This is evident in how Neil Harbisson became the world’s first Cyborg. He was born with an extreme form of color blindness that results in seeing in grayscale.
This is how Neil Harbisson, listens to colors.
Step into the mind of Neil’s symphony of color.
In his TED Talk “I listen to Color”, Neil Harbisson talks about his condition, how he got an Eyeborg implanted and his current reality. He is now able to listen to colors, in fact, beyond human perception including the infrared and the ultraviolet. You can watch the Ted video (9m 29 s) by clicking the image below or here.
With advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, fashion can be converted from visual senses to music for example. This enables us to abstract the taste of consumers and comes out with relevant propositions.
Here is an attempt by Stitchfix to convert the taste of one of its customers into a musical rhythm.
Click here to listen to Fashion
Hope you got a fresh perspective of generalising taste. A huge world of possibilities lies ahead of us in serving consumers in a way better than before.
We at Stylumia are working at mapping taste of fashion at various levels of aggregation from the unit of 1 (consumer) to store, to city, region and the country.
Few applications of taste match include
1. Deep Personalization
2. Taste driven stock replenishment/replacement to stores/distribution points
3. Taste driven predictions for future
4. Brand DNA Maps
It is a matter of time we will say the style “Sounds Good“.
