Archive for category fun
Watch out world, the Echo Nest is now unstoppable
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on December 22, 2009
Today, we are unveiling the new Echo Nest secret weapon that will guarantee World Domination: our new Echo Nest suit. These suits are in stunning robin’s egg blue velour and are made of a special textile that is guaranteed to absorb all forms of moisture, keeping us fresh and dry at all times. Here I am modeling the new suit at the Echo Nest Holiday party:
It's good to know I have could have a second career as a sweat suit model
Here are the Echo Nest big wigs trying out the suit: Brian, on the left, doesn’t need a special suit — he already has a superpower (doughnut scrying).
Brian, Jim, Tristan and Tim
Here’s Team Blue heading out at lunch to grab some burgers. They turned a few heads in Davis Square.
Team Blue: Chris, Tim, Scotty, Jason, Reid and Aaron
We have the suits in the office, and at any moment we are prepared to ‘suit up’ to meet any music data emergencies that may arise anywhere in the world. This suit is why the Echo Nest is so awesome.
The other obsession at the Echo Nest
Posted by Paul in fun, The Echo Nest on December 21, 2009
At the Echo Nest, everyone is obsessed with music. But there’s also another obsession as highlighted in this new photo blog: lookatthisfuckingcrema.com:
Echo Nest analysis and visualization for Dopplereffekt – Scientist
Posted by Paul in fun, remix, The Echo Nest, visualization on December 20, 2009
Rage against the pop machine this xmas
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, remix, The Echo Nest on December 5, 2009
There’s a movement this year to take back the Christmas charts from smarmy pop artists churned out by music factories like the X factor and Idol franchises. The kickoff to this movement is this exhortation posted in the ‘Rage Against the machine for Xmas #1‘ Facebook group:
Fed up of Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No.1?
Me too… So who’s up for a mass-purchase of the track ‘KILLING IN THE NAME’ from December 13th (DON’T BUY IT YET!) as a protest to the X-Factor monotony?
The group already has nearly 150K members and has received press coverage in stereoboard, nme, Drownedinsound and BritishMusicScene.
Now ‘Killing in the name’ isn’t exactly your typical Christmas song, so to help get people into the spirit of the projects I thought I would try to make the song be a bit more appealing to those with traditional Christmas music sensibilities. And so, I fired up the Echo Nest Jingler and generated a Christmas version of ‘Killing in the Name’. (The Jingler is a bit of software that will Xmas-ify any song by automatically adding sleigh bells, signal bells and the occasional Santa-ho). Here are the results:
This is just to get you in the Rage against Christmas mood. Remember to buy the track on December 13.
From Nickelback to Bickelnack
I saw that Nickelback just received a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance with their song ‘Burn it to the Ground’ and wanted to celebrate the event. Since Nickelback is known for their consistent sound, I thought I’d try to remix their Grammy-nominated performance to highlight their awesome self-similarity. So I wrote a little code to remix ‘Burning to the Ground’ with itself. The algorithm I used is pretty straightforward:
- Break the song down into smallest nuggets of sound (a.k.a segments)
- For each segment, replace it with a different segment that sounds most similar
I applied the algorithm to the music video. Here are the results:
Considering that none of the audio is in its original order, and 38% of the original segments are never used, the remix sounds quite musical and the corresponding video is quite watchable. Compare to the original (warning, it is Nickelback):
Feel free to browse the source code, download remix and try creating your own.
A Singular Christmas
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on November 30, 2009
Oh lookie – Brian has re-posted his Singular Christmas
Hypeify – a music tech company name generator
BennetK‘s 30 minute hack from the Boston Music Hack Day is a music company name generator:
I want a company named CloudCore.
Music Hack Day T-shirt
Posted by Paul in events, fun, The Echo Nest on November 17, 2009
Ben Lacker shows off the Boston Music Hack day tee-shirt – hot off the loom.
My Fame goes to 11
Posted by Paul in code, fun, java, Music, The Echo Nest, visualization on November 12, 2009
Sten has released a new version of the ultra-cool, award-winning Music Explorer FX. It has a new feature: The Fame Knob. While you are exploring for music you can set the Fame Knob up or down to control how well known or obscure the artists shown are. If you are looking for mainstream artists set the Fame Knob to high. Looking for new, undiscovered artists? Set the Fame Knob to low.
Sten has also included a number of performance enhancements so everything runs super snappy. Read more about the update on Sten’s blog and give it a whirl.
The Music Explorer FX. Click to launch the app.
Spotifying over 200 Billboard charts
Posted by Paul in code, data, fun, web services on November 8, 2009
Yesterday, I Spotified the Billboard Hot 100 – making it easy to listen to the charts. This morning I went one step further and Spotified all of the Billboard Album and Singles charts.
The Spotified Billboard Charts
That’s 128 singles charts (which includes charts like Luxembourg Digital Songs, Hot Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Song and Hot Ringtones ) and 83 album charts including charts like Top Bluegrass Albums, Top Cast Albums and Top R&B Catalog Albums.
In these 211 charts you’ll find 6,482 Spotify tracks, 2354 being unique (some tracks, like Miley Cyrus’s ‘The Climb’ appear on many charts).
Building the charts stretches the API limits of the Billboard API (only 1,500 calls allowed per day!), as well as stretches my patience (making about 10K calls to the Spotify API while trying not to exceed the rate limit, means it takes a couple of hours to resolve all the tracks). Nevertheless, it was a fun little project. And it shows off the Spotify catalog quite well. For popular western music they have really good coverage.
Requests for the Billboard API: Please increase the usage limit by 10 times. 1,500 calls per day is really limiting, especially when trying to debug a client library.
Requests for the Spotify API: Please, Please Please!!! – make it possible to create and modify Spotify playlists via web services.
Music Machinery 