Music Machinery

Ten years ago, May 3, 2004 I typed my very first blog post. At the time I was a researcher at Sun Microsystem’s Lab in the speech group working on speech synthesis and speech recognition systems, and so that was what I blogged about. Over the next year, my blog,  first called “Duke Speaks!” and then called “Duke Listens!”, (Duke is the name of the Java mascot) slowly morphed into a blog that was focused on music technology, and in particular, music information retrieval, music recommendation, music playlisting and discovery.  Five years later, when I left Sun to join The Echo Nest, I relaunched the blog as Music Machinery where I’ve been writing ever since.

I’ve written lots of blog posts. Some of my favorite from the Duke Listens! days are:

• My first MIR-related post (June 2004)
• My first hardcore MIR post (January 2005)
• A very wrong prediction about Apple (January 2005)
• I discover Radio Paradise (April 2005)
• First Google Music rumor (June 2005)
• First Amazon Music rumor (August 2005)
• First Pandora Post (September 2005)
• First mention of The Echo nest (October 2005)
• Why there’s no Google Music search (December 2005)
• First mention of Spotify (January 2007)
• My review of Spotify (November 2007)
• The Echo Nest goes live (March 2008)
• The Echo Nest launches their API (September 2008)
• My first look at iTunes genius recommendations (September 2008)
• My last post (February 2009)

Some of my more popular posts from the Music Machinery days are:

• The Swinger
• Inside the precision hack
• Exploring regional listening preferences
• moot wins, Time Inc. loses
• The Infinite Jukebox
• In search of the click track
• The Loudness War Analyzed
• Hacking spotify
• Favorite Artists vs Distinctive Artists by State
• How good is Google’s Instant Mix?
• How to process a million songs in 20 minutes
• Joco vs. Glee
• Precision Hacking

I’m really looking forward to the next decade of blogging. Now that I work  for Spotify, there’s a seemingly unlimited supply of music data that will be prime blogging material. It will be great fun.

Thanks to you my reader, for stopping by, and  for all of your great comments, and feedback over the years.