Archive for category remix
The Wub Machine
Posted by Paul in remix, Uncategorized on May 24, 2011
Memento Friday
It had to be done. Created with Echo Nest Remix.
The Echo Nest gets Personal
Posted by Paul in code, Music, playlist, recommendation, remix, The Echo Nest, web services on October 15, 2010
Here at the Echo Nest just added a new feature to our APIs called Personal Catalogs. This feature lets you make all of the Echo Nest features work in your own world of music. With Personal Catalogs (PCs) you can define application or user specific catalogs (in terms of artists or songs) and then use these catalogs to drive the behavior of other Echo Nest APIs. PCs open the door to all sorts of custom apps built on the Echo Nest platform. Here are some examples:
Create better genius-style playlists – With PCs I can create a catalog that contains all of the songs in my iTunes collection. I can then use this catalog with the Echo Nest Playlist API to generate interesting playlists based upon my own personal collection. I can create a playlist of my favorite, most danceable songs for a party, or I can create a playlist of slow, low energy, jazz songs for late night reading music.
Create hyper-targeted recommendations – With PCs I can make a catalog of artists and then use the artist/similar APIs to generate recommendations within this catalog. For instance, I could create an artist catalog of all the bands that are playing this weekend in Boston and then create Music Hack Day recommender that tells each visitor to Boston what bands they should see in Boston based upon their musical tastes.
Get info on lots of stuff – people often ask questions about their whole music collection. Like, ‘what are all the songs that I have that are at 113 BPM?‘, or ‘what are the softest songs?’ Previously, to answer these sorts of questions, you’d have to query our APIs one song at a time – a rather tedious and potentially lengthy operation (if you had, say, 10K tracks). With PCs, you can make a single catalog for all of your tracks and then make bulk queries against this catalog. Once you’ve created the catalog, it is very quick to read back all the tempos in your collection.
Represent your music taste – since a Personal Catalog can contain info such as playcounts, skips, and ratings for all of the artists and songs in your collection, it can serve as an excellent proxy to your music taste. Current and soon to be released APIs will use personal catalogs as a representation of your taste to give you personalized results. Playlisting, artist similarity, music recommendations all personalized based on you listening history.
These examples just scratch the surface. We hope to see lots of novel applications of Personal Catalogs. Check out the APIs, and start writing some code.
Turning music into silly putty
Posted by Paul in remix, The Echo Nest, video on September 5, 2010
I gave a talk last week at Last.fm about The Echo Nest Remix. Klaas has posted it on Vimeo. Here it is:
Keith Moon meets Animal
Another vafromb.py masterpiece from joshmillard.
Echo Nest Remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group
Posted by Paul in events, remix, The Echo Nest on July 15, 2010
Next week I’ll be giving a talk about remixing music with Echo Nest remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group. If you are in the Boston / Cambridge area next week, be sure to come on by and say ‘hi’. Info and RSVP for the talk are here: The Boston Python Meetup Group on Meetup.com
Here’s the abstract for the talk:
Paul Lamere will tell us about Echo Nest remix. Remix is an open source Python library for remixing music. With remix you can use Python to rearrange a track, combine it with others, beat/pitch shift it etc. – essentially it lets you treat a song like silly putty.
The Swinger is an interesting example of what it can do that made the rounds of the blogosphere: it morphs songs to give them a swing rhythm.
For more details about the type of music remixing you can do with remix, feel free to read: http://musicmachinery…
We swing both ways
Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions about Tristan’s Swinger is whether it can be used to ‘Un-swing’ a song. Can you take a song that already swings and straighten it out? Indeed, the answer is yes – we can swing both ways – but it is harder to unswing than it is to swing. Ammon on Happy Blog, the Happy Blog has given de-swinging a go with some success with his de-swinging of Revolution #1. Read his post and have a listen at Taking the swing out of songs. I can’t wait for the day when we can turn on the TV to watch and listen to MTV-Unswung.
Frasier does Nine Inch Nails
Posted by Paul in code, fun, remix, The Echo Nest on June 5, 2010
Oh My – Musician Josh Millard has recreated The Downward Spiral using nothing but audio from the NBC sitcom Frasier. So wrong, and yet, so right. Josh has the whole remixed album plus a video on his blog:
Sweet Child O’Mine – Vienna Style
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, research, The Echo Nest on May 24, 2010
I was wondering how far one could go with the time-stretching stuff and still make something musical. Here’s an attempt to turn a rock anthem into a waltz. It is a bit rough in a few places, especially the beginning – but I think it settles into a pretty nice groove.
The Swinger
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on May 21, 2010
[tweetmeme source= ‘plamere’ only_single=false] One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’s Swinger. The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect. Some examples:
Every Breath You Take
Money for Nothing
Cream
I Will
Update – a few more tracks -by request:
Enter Sandman
Daft Punk’s Around the world
Sweet Child O’ Mine
(one of my favs)
Don’t Stop Believin’
White Rabbit
(this one is hypnotic)
Swinger uses the new Dirac time-stretching capabilities of Echo Nest remix. Source code is available in the samples directory of remix.
Be sure to check out some of the other Music Hack Day hacks like Six Degrees of Black Sabbath, Jason’s Songbird Visualizer or the Artikulator.