While watching the Olympics over the weekend, I wrote a little web-app game that uses the new Echo Nest get_images call. The game is dead simple. You have to identify the artists in a series of images. You get to chose a level of difficulty and the style of your favorite music, and if you get a high score, your name and score will appear on the Top Scores board. Instead of using a simple score of percent correct, the score gets adjusted by a number of factors. There’s a time bonus, so if you answer fast you get more points, there’s a difficulty bonus, so if you identify unfamiliar artists you get more points, and if you chose the ‘Hard’ level of difficulty you get also get more points for every correct answer. The absolute highest score possible is 600 but that any score above 200 is rather awesome.
The app is extremely ugly (I’m a horrible designer), but it is fun – and it is interesting to see how similar artists from a single genre appear. Give it a go, post some high scores and let me know how you like it.
Music Machinery 
#1 by Tanchistu on February 14, 2010 - 11:43 pm
If you’ll make something this addictive that will actually gather some useful information for you, then you’ll have a hit.
I can imagine a few games that with enough user base will create a pretty good music discovery tool.
#2 by Jeff A on February 17, 2010 - 9:11 am
Hey Paul, how about a version like the “Cover Judge” where you need to guess the genre based on only the picture?