Archive for category The Echo Nest
Hacking on the Echo Nest at Boston Music Hack Day
Posted by Paul in code, events, fun, The Echo Nest on October 13, 2010
Kind of Blue
Kind of Green
If you are going to the Music Hack Day Boston this weekend, you may want to consider creating an hack based on the Echo Nest APIs. The Echo Nest is offering a prize for the best hack that is built based upon Echo Nest technology. The prize is the much coveted Echo Nest Sweatsedo. The softness, the coolness and the ‘blueness’ of this casual attire is unsurpassed by the clothing offered by any other music technology company. However, we realize that not everyone can wear the sweatsedo with proper style. For those, who are not cool enough to wear the Echo Nest sweatsedo, they can opt for the alternate prize of $1,000 cash. So your choice is for a prize is a Kind of Blue, or a Kind of Green.
But, wait! There’s more. Since we are unveiling two new APIs at Music Hack Day weekend, we are going to offer not one, but two prizes, one to each of the two best hacks that use the Echo Nest APIs. If you create one of the two best hacks that use the Echo Nest, you will get to chose from the ‘Kind of Blue’ or the ‘Kind of Green’ prize. So get hacking!
Some like it loud …
Posted by Paul in code, The Echo Nest, web services on October 6, 2010
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):
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.
The Music App Summit
Posted by Paul in events, The Echo Nest on September 20, 2010
The Music App Summit being held in San Francisco is just a couple of weeks away. At the summit, Billboard will be presenting the first ever Music App Awards that highlight the best and most innovative mobile music apps. The finalists are:
Best Music Engagement App:
Tap Tap Revenge 3
SoundHound Infinity
Mix Me In2 Taylor Swift
Best Music Creation App:
LaDiDa
AmpliTude iRig
MorphWiz
Best Music Streaming App:
Rhapsody
MOG
Thumbplay
Best Touring App:
Live Phish
R5
Bonnaroo
Best Artist-based App:
Linkin Park 8-Bit Revolution
I Am T-Pain
TouchChords: Jimmy Vaughan
Best Branded App:
50s Sound Lab
ZOOZbeat Sprite
Gibson
The summit includes lots of good speakers too, including keynotes by:
Janus Friis, Co-founder, Rdio, Skype, Kazaa, Joost, Atomico Ventures
Evan Harrison, EVP Clear Channel Radio, President Clear Channel Radio Digital
Jim Lucchese, CEO, The Echo Nest
Jim has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Prior to GT, Jim held sales and corporate development positions at Hughes, where he managed market development and sales with annual revenues exceeding $20 Million.
Matt Murphy, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Matt Murphy is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers where he manages the iFund, which focuses on defining applications for the mobile internet. Matt is either a Director or works closely with the management teams of Shazam, shopkick, Ocarina and others. Previously, Matt was a board observer at Google and a Director at Peakstream and Dash Navigation
Dave Stewart, Producer, Solo Artist and Mobile Music Consultant/Evangelist
Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer, Smule and Assistant Professor of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Ge Wang is the Co-founder, CTO, and CEO of Smule, a developer of interactive sonic media. Smule’s bestselling iPhone and iPad apps include Glee, I Am T-Pain, and others. Dr. Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He is chief-architect and co-creator of ChucK audio programming language, and founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO).
If you are interested in going, you can sign up here – and if you use the registration code SPMEL you will save $100.
Do you do Music Information Retrieval?
Posted by Paul in code, ismir, Music, music information retrieval, The Echo Nest on September 10, 2010
We’re ramping up hiring at the Echo Nest. We’re looking for good MIR people at different experience levels to help us realize the company’s vision of knowing everything about all music automatically. I would guess that we are the closest analog to ISMIR in the industry– we only do music (audio and text), the base technology is straight out of our dissertations (brian, tristan) and we’re active in conferences and universities. We work with an amazing amount of music data on a daily basis and we sell it to some great people and companies that are changing the face of music.
MIR-background candidates are especially encouraged to apply as long as you have relevant experience and want to work on implementation at a very fast growing startup. These are almost all full time positions in our offices near Boston, MA USA. Even if you’re not graduating for a while let us know if you’re interested now.
More info at: http://the.echonest.com/company/jobs/
Group coding session at The Echo Nest
Even without Zooey, Music Hack Days are pretty awesome
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on September 9, 2010
Paul + Matt @ The Hub - Photo by Thomas Bonte
This picture represents the perfection of the Music Hack Day. Here I am sitting at my computer, in a dark room, totally focused on building my hack, while I sit next to the music technology superstar Matt Ogle of Last.fm. In front of me is a beer, a red bull and a glass of Ben Fields‘ private stock. What could be better than this! (Well, I suppose sitting on my right, just out of view could be Zooey Deschanel, that might be better). If you want to find yourself in such a position, then consider signing up for one of the upcoming Music Hack Days. There’s one in Barcelona on October 2,3 and there’s one in Boston on October 16, 17. Registrations are going fast, so sign up early to guarantee that you’ll have a seat.
Music Hack Day London
I’ve just returned from my weekend in London where I participated in the Music Hack Day held at the Guardian Offices in London. The event was attended by nearly 200 hackers who spent the weekend learning about new music technologies and then using those technologies to build something new. This was a fantastic event that seemingly went off without a hitch. The internet worked, there was plenty of coffee, sodas and beer, and it was a very comfortable space to get stuff done. And people got things done – over 50 hacks were built – Here are some of my favorites:
Speakatron – A program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth. It can tell what shape you’re making and how high your mouth is on the screen as synthesis parameters. This one was the big crowd pleaser. Here’s a pic of Marek giving his demo:
Photo by Thomas Bonte
Future of Music 2010 – Brian Whitman presents the best music recommendation technology ever – Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. Yes, indeed, this app erases the music from your hard drive that you shouldn’t be listening too.
Future of Music 2010
Lazy DJ – LazyDJ is an app for lazy DJs who do not want to think about what song they should play next.
Radio 1 Playlist Squirrel – Using small woodland animals to help discover music. You have to see it to understand it. Great demo. Hope they put it online, because, really the world needs more music discovering squirrels.
Photo by Thomas Bronte
Radio Map – a real time browser for on-line radio – Sebastian Heise and Michael Hlatk analyzed the audio for hundreds of Internet radio stations and built a visualization of the Internet radio space that lets you browse for stations based on music similarity.
Photo by Thomas Bronte
Auto Score Tubing – this is an amazing hack – using score synchronizing tech from Queen Mary’s music researchers, the folks from Musescore creates a hack that automatically synchronizes a music score with a youtube performance of that score. Check out the video, it is awesome.
BumbleTab – a very patient guitar tutor – waits patiently for you to play the right notes, then stiches all of your right notes into an awesome song:
Piracy – Making music piracy more like real piracy… Think Geocaching for music…
MashBox – a community driven mashable jukebox – which you can use to make mashups like Beat and Whip It. There’s a nifty prezo on the process they used to create the mashup.
Earth Destroyers – this is my hack – it is a web app that tells you which bands have earth destroying tours.
It is almost like being there:To get a taste of what it was like being at the Music Hack Day be sure to check out Thomas Bronte’s photos of the event – in addition to being the CEO of musescore, Thomas is also an excellent photographer: Music Hack Day London 2010 Slide show
Click to see the Music Hack Day Slide show by Thomas Bonte
Congrats to Dave Haynes and all of the team that put together the Music Hack Day London. It was a fantastic event!
Dave Haynes closes the Music Hack Day
We are the Earth Destroyers
Posted by Paul in Music, The Echo Nest, web services on September 5, 2010
For my London Music Hackday hack I built a web app called ‘Earth Destroyers’. Give Earth Destroyers a band name and it will show you how eco-friendly the band’s touring schedule is. Earth Destroyers calculates the total distance traveled from the first gig to the last along with the average distance between shows. If an artist has an average inter-show distance of greater than a 1,000 km I consider it an ‘Earth Destroyer’. The app also shows you a Google map so you can see just how inefficient the tour is. To build the app I used event data from Bandsintown.
Check out Earth Destroyers
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:
Is that a million songs in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Posted by Paul in Music, playlist, research, The Echo Nest, web services on September 2, 2010
Yesterday, Steve Jobs reminded us that it was less than 10 years ago when Apple announced the first iPod which could put a thousand songs in your pocket. With the emergence of cloud-based music services like Spotify and Rhapsody, we can now have a virtually endless supply of music in our pocket. The ‘bottomless iPod’ will have as big an effect on how we listen to music as the original iPod had back in 2001. But with millions of songs to chose from, we will need help finding music that we want to hear. Shuffle play won’t work when we have a million songs to chose from. We will need new tools that help us manage our listening experience. I’m convinced that one of these tools will be intelligent automatic playlisting.
This weekend at the Music Hack Day London, The Echo Nest is releasing the first version of our new Playlisting API. The Playlisting API lets developers construct playlists based on a flexible set of artist/song selection and sorting rules. The Echo Nest has deep data about millions of artists and songs. We know how popular Lady Gaga is, we know the tempo of every one of her songs, we know other artists that sound similar to her, we know where she’s from, we know what words people use to describe her music (‘dance pop’, ‘club’, ‘party music’, ‘female’, ‘diva’ ). With the Playlisting API we can use this data to select music and arrange it in all sorts of flexible ways – from very simple Pandora radio style playlists of similar sounding songs to elaborate playlists drawing on a wide range of parameters. Here are some examples of the types of playlists you can construct with the API:
- Similar artist radio – generate a playlist of songs by similar artists
- Jogging playlist – generate a playlist of 80s power pop with a tempo between 120 and 130 BPM, but never ever play Bon Jovi
- London Music Hack Day Playlist -generate a playlist of electronic and techno music by unknown artists near London, order the tracks by tempo from slow to fast
- Tomorrow’s top 40 – play the hottest songs by pop artists with low familiarity that are starting to get hottt
- Heavy Metal Radio – A DMCA-Compliant radio stream of nothing but heavy metal
We have also provide a dynamic playlisting API that will allow for the creation of playlists that adapt based upon skipping and rating behavior of the listener.
I’m about to jump on a plane for the Music Hackday London where we will be demonstrating this new API and some cool apps that have already been built upon it. I’m hoping to see a few apps emerge from this Music Hack Day that use the new API. More info about the APIs and how you can use it to do all sorts of fun things will be forthcoming. For the motivated dive into the APIs right now.
Music Machinery 