Music Machinery

Another Music Hack Day weekend … this time in Boston hosted at MIT.  It was a pretty awesome event. The space at MIT was perfect for hacking, with the best network connectivity I’ve ever seen at a hacking event.   For my weekend hack, I took the idea from my Iceland hack (Infinite Gangnam Style), and made it work with any song.  The result is The Infinite Jukebox.

With The Infinite Jukebox, you can create a never-ending and ever changing version of any song.   The app works by sending your uploaded track over to The Echo Nest, where it is decomposed into individual beats.  Each beat is then analyzed and matched to other similar sounding beats in the song.  This information is used to create a detailed song graph of paths though similar sounding beats.  As the song is played,  when the next beat  has similar sounding beats there’s a chance that we will branch to a completely different part of the song. Since the branching is to a very similar sounding beat in the song, you (in theory) won’t notice the jump.  This process of branching to similar sounding beats can continue forever, giving you an infinitely long version of the song.

To accompany the playback,  I created a chord diagram that shows the beats of the song along the circumference of the circle along with with chords representing the possible paths from each beat to it’s similar neighbors.  When the song is not playing, you can mouse over any beat and see all of the possible paths for that beat.  When the song is playing, the visualization shows the single next potential beat.  I was quite pleased at how the visualization turned out. I think it does a good job of helping the listener understand what is going on under the hood, and different songs have very different looks and color palettes. They can be quite attractive.

I did have to adapt the Infinite Gangnam Style algorithm for the Infinite Jukebox. Not every song is as self-similar as Psy’s masterpiece, so I have to dynamically adjust the beat-similarity threshold until there are enough pathways in the song graph to make the song infinite. This means that the overall musical quality may vary from song to song depending on the amount of self-similarity in the song.

Overall, the results sound good for most songs.  I still may do a bit of tweaking on the algorithm to avoid some degenerate cases (you can get stuck in a strange attractor at the end of Karma Police for instance).  Give it a try, upload your favorite song and listen to it forever.  The Infinite Jukebox.

Some of my favorite listener contributed tracks:

• Call Me Maybe
• R Kelly’s Ignition (remix)
• Scatman by Scatman John
• Feel Good by Gorillaz
• The Game Has Changed by Daft Punk
• Supersition by StevieWonder 
• Blue Rondo a la Turk by Dave Brubeck
• BIRDHOUSE IN YOUR SOUL by They Might Be Giants
• Mediterranean Sundance 5.14 by Al DiMeola – this one is fantastic!
• I Feel Love by Donna Summer – this song was made for the Infinite Jukebox
• Come Together by The Beatles – The Beatles are really tight on this song, so it works really well
• Yakity Sax – The Benny Hill Theme – oh my.
• The Game has Changed by Daft Punk –  “This song was made for the Infinite Jukebox” – an insightful Internet user
• Sabotage by the Beatie Boys 
• Green Grass and High Tides by The Outlaws – the guitar solo that never ends!  via @tpetr
• Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana – seamless infinite grunge

In preparation for the upcoming Music Hack Day Boston, I was running the latest build of The Echo Nest Remix through its paces.  As part of the Remix checkout I thought I’d try running Psy’s Gangnam Style through Tristan’s Swinger. The results are amusing.  Listen to Psywinger:

[audio http://static.echonest.com.s3.amazonaws.com/InfiniteGangnamStyle/GangnamStyle-Swung.mp3]

 

The code for this marvelous hack can be found here:  The Swinger on Github.

One of the most frequent complaints I’ve heard about Infinite Gangnam Style is that it is hard to take it with you.  Due to the image swapping pseudo-video in the desktop version, it doesn’t run very well on iOS devices.  This means you can’t listen to Gangnam  Style 24/7.   Clearly, since Infinite Gangnam Style is supposed to let you listen to Gangnam Style forever, this would not do.  So, I’ve made an iPhone specific version called  Gangn∞m Style:

This version plays on your iPhone device through Mobile Safari, letting you listen to a never-ending, every changing version of Gangnam Style wherever you are and whenever you want.   So now there’s no excuse to ever stop listening to the greatest pop song of the millenium.

Some tech details: The hardest bit was figuring out how to prevent the iPhone from going to sleep after a minute or so of playing.  There’s no direct way to disable sleep mode in the browser, but there’s a little hack.  I created a 5 second long silent mp3, and then force that silence to loop forever with a bit of html:

        <audio src="silence.mp3" preload autoplay loop></audio>

This keeps Safari live and prevents the iPhone from deciding it wants to go to sleep. Of course this will wear down your battery, but that is one of the risks inherent in infinite listening.

I used jQTouch to give a nifty iOS look and feel in the browser, and of course I used the Echo Nest analyzer to figure out where all the beats were in the song, and to build the beat by beat similarity graph that I use to make the song play forever.

Go check out  Gangn∞m Style and let me know what you think.

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.

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.

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.