Music Machinery

One of the nifty features that we’ve rolled out in the last 6 months here at the Echo Nest is an extremely flexible  song search API.  With this API you can search for songs based upon all sorts of criteria from tempo, key mode, duration.  You can use this API to do things that would be really hard to do.  For example, here’s a bit of python that will show you the loudest songs for an artist:

from pyechonest import song as songAPI
from pyechonest import artist as artistAPI

def find_loudest_songs(artist_name):
    artists = artistAPI.search(artist_name, results=1)
    if artists:
        songs = songAPI.search(artist_id=artists[0].id, sort='loudness-desc')
        for song in songs:
            print song.get_audio_summary().loudness, song.title

Here  are the loudest songs for some  sample artists:

• The Beatles: Helter Skelter, Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
• Metallica: Cyanide, All Nightmare Long
• The White Stripes: Broken Bricks, Fell in love with a girl
• Led Zeppelin: Rock and Roll, Black Dog

We can easily  change the code to help us find the softest songs for an artist, or the fastest, or the shortest.   Some more examples:

• Shortest Beatles song: Her Majesty at 23.2 second
• Longest Beatles song:  Revolution #9 at 8:35
• Slowest Beatles song: Julia at 57 BPMs
• Softest Beatles song: Julia at -27DB BPMs (Blackbird is at -25DB)

I think it is interesting to find the outliers. For instance, here’s the softest song by Muse (which is usually a very loud artist):

Bedroom Acoustics by Muse

We can combine these attributes too so we can find the fastest loud Beatles song (I feel fine, at -7.5 DB and 180 BPM, or the slowest loud Beatles song (Don’t let me down, at -6.6 DB and 65 BPM).

The search songs api is a good example of the power of the Echo Nest platform. We have data on millions of songs that you can use to answer questions about music that have traditionally been very hard to answer.