Infinite Gangnam Style
This weekend at Music Hack Day Reykjavik I built a music hack called Infinite Gangnam Style. This hack takes the viral hit by Psy and creates a never ending, ever changing version of the song. Here’s a video of it:
The app works by taking the audio and analyzing it with The Echo Nest analyzer to break it up into its individual beats. Next, an analysis pass is run on all the beats finding each beat’s nearest similar sounding neighbors that fall within a similarity threshold. Then, the song is played beat-by-beat – but with the added twist that any time we play a particular beat there’s a chance that we will transition instead to one of the beat’s similar sounding neighbors. For a pop song like Gangnam Style there’s lots of repetition so there’s plenty of good transition points. The result is that we can loop through the song forever with the song always morphing.
Since the Gangnam Style video is a key part of the song, I’ve included a dynamically remixed video in the web app too. (The mixing is done just be image swapping, there’s no way to dynamically control a video player as far as I know, which is why this app will load about 2000 images ;).
Check out Infinite Gangnam Style and the rest of the Music Hack Day Reykjavik Hacks. Update: Check out the iPhone version
This hack was inspired by Tristan’s “James Brown Forever ” hack.
Strangest political music news stories
If you look through the Top 50 Most Political Artists you’ll find some rather unusual election-related news items. Here are some of the most extreme:
- Megadeth frontman accuses Obama of murdering people to promote gun safety
- Devo to unleash song about Mitt Romney’s dog
- LMFAO’s Sky Blu Says Mitt Romney ‘Vulcan-Gripped’ Him On Airplane
- Glenn Beck writes open letter to Muse
- Secret Service Looking Into Ted Nugent’s Violent Obama Threat
- Nicki Minaj Receives Death Threats Over Mitt Romney Rap Line
There’s some weird stuff going on out there.
Top 50 Most Political Artists
Musicians are not shy about expressing their political opinions nor are politicians shy about courting favor of the musical elite. As we approach the U.S. Presidential election I thought it would be interesting to see which artists have the most political capital. To do this, I looked through all the recent news and blog posts (using The Echo Nest API) about each of the top 1,000 most popular artists and scored each artist based upon the number of election-related stories found for each artist. I’ve taken the results of this search and summarized the results in this app:
The Top 50 Most Political Artists
Here’s a screenshot:
Not surprisingly popular artists make lots of news, and when a popular artists says or does something political it tends to make news, especially when what they say goes against expectations. For example, when Nicki Minaj said she was going to vote for Mitt Romney it created a storm of hundreds of news articles and blog posts (and even a response from President Obama).
Check out the list of top 50 political artists. Some common themes: Musicians get pissed off if you use their music in your campaign and they don’t agree with you, President Obama gets lots of love (and fundraising help) from popular artists, and sounding like a crazy artist gets you lots of attention.
Also, check out this related post on how we are using musical taste to predict your politics.
Music Tech Meetup in Dublin
A bunch of music tech folk will be in Dublin Ireland next week to attend ACM Recommender Systems 2012. We’ll be heading over to the Bull & Castle, beside Christ Church, Dublin City on September 13 at 18:30 to join <Pub> Standands Dublin, to hang out and chat about hacking music. Pub Standards is a post-conference drink-up without the conference. There’s no format, talks or presentations. It’s just geeks + beer. If you are in the area and are interested in hanging out, feel free to come on down and have a beer. 
Bangarang Boomerang
Posted by Paul in code, fun, The Echo Nest on August 18, 2012
My latest music hack is Bangarang Boomerang. It is a web app (runs in Chrome or the latest Safari), that lets you ‘drive’ the Skrillex song. You can freeze-frame the song on a beat, you can make the song go backwards beat by beat, you can advance through the song at double time, or triple time, and set bookmarks to let you easily jump to different sections of the song. It is a rather fun app that lets you feel like a musician, even if you have very little musical talent.
Watch the quick Youtube demo, and then try it yourself: Bangarang Boomerang
[youtube http://youtu.be/GJQ1K1dnU2A]
Music, Tech, Art and Interactivity in one great party
This friday, my daughter Jennie and I will be heading down to Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood to take part in DUMBO Summer Friday. We’ll be showing off some nifty music hacks that have been built recently, including our OMA winning Bohemian Rhapsichord. We are especially excited to show off a brand new hack called Bangarang Boomerang. This hack can turn you into Skrillex with about 5 minutes of practice. I’ll be sure to post a link after the event on Friday. Here’s the link: Bangarang Boomerang
If you are in NYC on Friday, head on over to the DUMBO Arch for day of music, tech, art and interactivity.
Update: We had a great day at the dumbo arch showing off all sorts of music hacks. It was great to see some of the local music tech celebs (Eliot, Jason, Peter). Demoing music in the arch was quite a challenge. Strange acoustics, trains driving by every 5 minutes overhead. Special thanks to Cy Cary for going the extra mile to make sure that our sound was top notch. Here’s a picture while we were setting up:
Hear Here update
Posted by Paul in code, The Echo Nest on July 22, 2012
A bit more coding this weekend on ‘Hear Here’ my iPhone app that plays music by nearby artists. It is now feature complete. The list of features is rather small – it really is a ‘do one thing well’, kind of app. It plays music by the nearest artists that match your filter. You can filter currently by the popularity of the artist. If you are adventurous, you can listen to music by all nearby artists, but if you are not so brave you can just listen to music by mainstream or popular artists. The app shows you how far away the ‘now playing’ artist is and shows you how many artists are within a 25 mile radius. All music is streamed from Rdio and of course you’ll need an Rdio subscription to hear full streams. I made my own icon – it is pretty ugly – if you have design skills and want to contribute a logo I’d be very pleased to use it. Here’s a video of the app in action for a user who happens to be in Cupertino:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfb5P8_8Dpk&hd=1]
Next steps for the app are lots of testing, especially with poor network connectivity. After that, I’ll make sure I’m following all the rules for Rdio and Apple – and once I’m conforming to all the TOS’s and UI guidelines I’ll submit it to the App Store (as a free app).
What’s your musical stereotype?
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on July 12, 2012
You can usually learn something about a person by looking at what music they listen to. Someone who listens to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones is likely to be from a very different demographic than someone whose favorite artist is Julie Andrews. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule – there are probably a few playlists out there in the world that have both “Anarchy in the UK” and “My Favorite things” but I’m quite sure you won’t be finding a mosh pit at a Julie Andrews concert any time soon.
As we collect more data about what people listen to we begin to learn more about the demographics of listening. Who really listens to Country music? Are they really mostly right-leaning southerners? Are all Hanson fans now 30 years old? To learn how we can answer some of these questions be sure to read Echo Nest founder Brian Whitman’s latest post on Variogr.am about the kinds of predictions we can make about people based upon what they listen to.
This week, The Echo Nest is releasing some new API features that make it easy for developers to build apps that take advantage of this listening data. One new API is Taste Profile Similarity. This API lets you take a seed taste profile (a taste profile is how The Echo Nest represents an individual’s music taste) and find other taste profiles that are similar to that seed. To demonstrate one type of application you can build with this new similarity API, we’ve created a web app called “What’s your stereotype?” This application will look at your music taste (based on your Facebook likes, or your jams from This is my Jam), and tell you which Internet meme best fits your listening style.
Yes, the app will pigeonhole you into a narrow, and probably demeaning demographic. You will probably be offended. Here’s my musical stereotype:
If you want to have your own music tastes pigeonholed like this can try the app yourself at What’s your stereotype? Just remember, you will probably be offended.
To create this app, we identified a whole bunch of Internet memes and personas and made some predictions about the type of music each of these personas would listen to. We then look at the music taste similarity between you and each of the personas – the closest matching one becomes your musical stereotype.
The hardest part about building this app was identifying all of the appropriate Internet memes, predicting the music taste for each meme, collecting images, links and attribution, and most challenging of all, writing the witticisms that accompany each meme. Leading this effort was Matthew Santiago, our chief data quality guy here at The Echo Nest. Matthew organized the meme-dream team to collect and massage all this data. Our highly creative meme-dream team includes Michelle, Nell, Charlie, Alyse, Ryan, Sonja, Nicola, Sam, Roisin, Julie, Sara and Alex.
This app demonstrates what we can do with just a little bit of data about your music tastes. Using the techniques that Brian describes coupled with all the deep data we are gathering around listening habits will help us get a much deeper understanding of your music tastes. This understanding will be key to helping us craft the best music listening experience for you. So, go check out the What’s your stereotype? . I hope you’ll have as much fun with the app as we had in building it.
A brief History of Rock N’Roll in 100 Riffs
Alex Chadwick plays 100 guitar riffs in chronological order. It is a fun challenge to cover the caption and try to name them all just from the sound.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/43426940]
Hear Here Version 0.3
More weekend programming on ‘Hear Here’ the mobile version of the Road Trip mixtape. I’ve added a familiarity filter so you can chose whether you want to listen to only the most recognizable artists in a region, or you want to listen to everything. Screenshots:
I’ve taken the app on a few road tests. There were a few crashes (of the app kind, not the car kind, luckily). Stability and responsiveness with unreliable networking is a fun challenge. I’m taking a 1000 mile roadtrip in a week or two, hopefully will have it 100% ready by then.
Music Machinery 