Keith Moon meets Animal

July 22, 2010

Another vafromb.py masterpiece from joshmillard.

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Posted by Paul

Echo Nest Remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group

July 15, 2010

Next week I’ll be giving a talk about remixing music with Echo Nest remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group.  If you are in the Boston / Cambridge area next week, be sure to come on by and say ‘hi’.  Info and RSVP for the talk are here:  The Boston Python Meetup Group on Meetup.com

Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Paul Lamere will tell us about Echo Nest remix. Remix is an open source Python library for remixing music. With remix you can use Python to rearrange a track, combine it with others, beat/pitch shift it etc. – essentially it lets you treat a song like silly putty.

The Swinger is an interesting example of what it can do that made the rounds of the blogosphere: it morphs songs to give them a swing rhythm.

For more details about the type of music remixing you can do with remix, feel free to read: http://musicmachinery…

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Posted by Paul

We swing both ways

June 7, 2010

Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions about Tristan’s Swinger is whether it can be used to ‘Un-swing’ a song.  Can you take a song that already swings and straighten it out? Indeed, the answer is yes – we can swing both ways  - but it is harder to unswing than it is to swing.  Ammon on Happy Blog, the Happy Blog has given de-swinging a go with some success with his de-swinging of Revolution #1.   Read his post and have a listen at Taking the swing out of songs.   I can’t wait for the day when we can turn on the TV to watch and listen to  MTV-Unswung.

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Posted by Paul

Frasier does Nine Inch Nails

June 5, 2010

Oh My –  Musician Josh Millard  has recreated The Downward Spiral using nothing but audio from the NBC sitcom Frasier. So wrong, and yet, so right.  Josh has the whole remixed album plus a video on his blog:

Nine Inch Niles – The Seattleward Spiral

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Posted by Paul

Sweet Child O’Mine – Vienna Style

May 24, 2010

I was wondering how far one could go with the time-stretching stuff and still make something musical.  Here’s an attempt to turn a rock anthem into a waltz.  It is a bit rough in a few places, especially the beginning – but  I think it settles into a pretty nice groove.

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Posted by Paul

The Swinger

May 21, 2010
 One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’s Swinger.  The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing.  It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.  It has quite a magical effect.  Some examples:

Every Breath You Take

Money for Nothing

Cream

I Will

Update – a few more tracks -by request:

Enter Sandman

Daft Punk’s Around the world

Sweet Child O’ Mine

(one of my favs)

Don’t Stop Believin’

White Rabbit

(this one is hypnotic)

Swinger uses the new Dirac time-stretching capabilities of Echo Nest remix. Source code is available in the samples directory of remix.

Be sure  to check out some of the other Music Hack Day hacks like Six Degrees of Black Sabbath, Jason’s Songbird Visualizer or the Artikulator.

402 Comments | Music, The Echo Nest, remix | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Paul

Earworm and Capsule at Music Hack Day San Francisco

May 14, 2010
 This weekend The Echo Nest is releasing some new remix functionality – Earworm and Capsule.  Earworm lets you create a new version of a song that is any length you want.  Would you like 2 minute version of Stairway to Heaven? Or a 3 hour version of Freebird? Or an Infinitely long version of Sex Machine?  Earworm can do that.   Here’s a 60 minute version of a little Rolling Stones ditty:

Capsule takes a list of tracks and optimizes the song transitions by reordering them and applying automatic beat matching and cross fading to give you a seamless playlist.  It is really neat stuff.    Here’s an example of a capsule between two Bob Marley songs:

It makes a nice little Bob Marley medley.

Jason writes about Capsule and Earworm and some other new features in remix  in his new (and rather awesome) blog:  Running With Data – Earworm and Capsule.  Check it out.

1 Comment | Music, The Echo Nest, events, remix, web services | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Paul

Bad Romance – the memento edition

March 18, 2010

At SXSW I  gave a talk about how computers can help make remixing music easier.  For the talk I created a few fun remixes.  Here’s one of my favorites.  It’s  a beat-reversed version of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.   The code to create it is here: vreverse.py

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Posted by Paul

Here comes the antiphon

February 25, 2010

I’m gearing up for the SXSW panel on remix I’m giving in a couple of weeks.  I thought I should veer away from ‘science experiments’ and try to create some remixes that sound musical.  Here’s one where I’ve used remix to apply a little bit of a pre-echo to ‘Here Comes the Sun’.  It gives it a little bit of a call and answer feel:

The core (choir?) code is thus:

for bar in enumerate(self.bar):
 cur_data  = self.input[bar]
 if last:
     last_data = self.input[last]
     mixed_data = audio.mix(cur_data, last_data, mix=.3)
     out.append(mixed_data)
 else:
    out.append(cur_data)
 last = bar

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Posted by Paul

Scar – an automatic remix of ‘Cars’

January 30, 2010

An automatic cut-up by Adam Lindsay of this video:

Adam says: No human choices were made in the creation of this video. The video and the audio are always cut in sync with reference to the original: what you see and hear at any given moment are what Rob Sheridan captured in real time with his single camera setup.

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Posted by Paul

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