Paul
I'm the Director of Developer Community at The Echo Nest, a research-focused music intelligence startup that provides music information services to developers and partners through a data mining and machine listening platform. I am especially interested in hybrid music recommenders and using visualizations to aid music discovery.
Playing with strudel
Posted in Music on October 28, 2025
I’ve been lurking in the live coding world for a few years. I’ve been re-inspired by Strudel. It’s a no-install javascript-centric version of Tidal Cycles that fits into my brain better than the Haskell-derived Tidal every did. I’ll be posting some of my experiments at Music Machinery on the Bear Blog.
Music Machinery on Substack
Posted in Music on November 13, 2022
I fondly recall the Google Reader days when lots of folks were reading long form content. With the demise of Google Reader, and the rise of Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, long form content drifted into the background. But it may be coming back, thanks at least in part, to Substack. I’m going to give Substack a try, so you’ll find new content posted at musicmachinery.substack.com.
My favorite blog post of all time
Posted in Music on September 9, 2020
I’ve been reading blogs seemingly forever. I’ve read lots of great posts .. but there’s one blog post that I still think about all the time even though it is nearly 5 years old. It’s by Sascha Judd and its all boy bands and the diversity crisis in tech. It’s a must read: How The Tech Sector Could Move In One Direction.
Someday I may get back to organizing tech events – and when I do, I’ll be thinking about better ways to engage with fan armies.
Duke Listens! returns (again)
Posted in Music on September 7, 2020
A few months ago, we finally shutdown the final remnants of the old Echo Nest infrastructure. One of casualties of this final shutdown was the archive of my old blog Duke Listens! that I authored while I was a researcher at Sun Labs. However, I did manage to have a backup sitting on an old backblaze disk, so this morning I took a bit of time to re-host it on one of my personal servers. You can find it at:
http://dukelistens.playlistmachinery.com/
The blog serves as a reminder of the history of music recommendation and discovery during the iPhone era. Some notable posts:
- My first MIR-related post (June 2004)
- My first hardcore MIR post (January 2005)
- A decade too early 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)
The World’s First MachineLearning-enabled musical keyboard !?!
Posted in generative music, Music on December 2, 2019
Today Amazon released AWS DeepComposer which is a keyboard that will let you “create a melody that will transform into a completely original song in seconds”.
To me it looks like an Arturia Keystep knock-off. I’m still puzzling over whether or not there’s any special ML-related features – or is it just a MIDI keyboard that comes with some AWS credits. Anyone with any insights, please let me know.
How Generative Music Works
Posted in generative music, Music on December 2, 2019
Tero Parvianen has en excellent introduction to Generative Music with lots of live examples. Well worth 20 minutes of your time with lots of food for thought.
Music Machinery Chapter 2
Posted in generative music, Music, synthesis on December 2, 2019
I’ve spent the last 15 or so years thinking mostly about the machinery that gets music from the bits in an audio recording into the ears of a listener. There are dozens of examples of tools for music discovery, organization and listening in the sidebar at the right on this blog. But lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the machinery that goes into getting the bits into an audio recording in the first place. I’m particularly interested in two aspects of this: (1) music synthesis – the machinery that can create the sounds from scratch and (2) generative music – machinery that can generate the music from scratch.
If you are interested in synthesis and generative music, feel free to follow along in Music Machinery Chapter 2. I’m a newbie at it all so pointers and guidance will be greatly appreciated.
Is this thing on …
Posted in Music on December 2, 2019
Woah, its been a while since I’ve posted to this blog (three and a half years to be exact). I think it’s time for a bit of a reboot on this blog. Stay tuned!
Girl Talk In A Box update
Posted in Music on April 30, 2016
I’ve pushed out some updates to GirlTalkInABox – there are now some nifty filters (chorus, phaser, delay and wahwah), and you can interactively adjust the playback rate of the song. A few other minor changes as well to make live performances a little easier. Check it out at GirlTalkInABox.
Smarter Playlists – My Top Tracks
Posted in Music on March 13, 2016
I’ve just added a new Smarter Playlists component called My Top Tracks. This track source will generate a list of the top 50 tracks from your recent listening history. You can choose from 3 different time ranges:
- short term – the last month or so
- medium term – the last half year or so
- long term – the last several years
The component configuration looks like this:
Here’s an example program using the new component to surface up tracks that I’ve listened to a lot in the past that haven’t been getting a lot of play time in the last half-year.
Feel free to try out the new component and send me feedback via the google group.
update – to use the new component, you will need to logout and then log back into SmarterPlaylists to grant it the extra permissions it needs to read your recent play history.
Music Machinery 