Posts Tagged musicandbits
The SQL Join is destroying music
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on October 28, 2009
Brian Whitman,one of the founders of the Echo Nest, gave a provocative talk last week at Music and Bits. Some excerpts:
Useless MIR Problems:
- Genre Identification – “Countless PhDs on this useless task. Trying to teach a computer a marketing construct”
Hard but interesting MIR Problems:
- Finding the saddest song in the world
- Predicting Pitchfork and All Music Guide ratings
- Predicting the gender of a listener based upon their music taste
On Recommendation:
- “The best music experience is still very manual… I am still reading about music, not using a recommender.”
- “If we only used collaborative filtering to discover music, the popular artists would eat the unknowns alive.”
- “The SQL Join is destroying music”
Brian’s notes on the talk are on his blog. The slides are online here. Highly recommended:
Music and Bits
Posted by Paul in events, fun, Music, The Echo Nest on October 13, 2009
If you are heading to Amsterdam next week for the Amsterdam Dance Event, you may want to check out the Music & Bits pre-conference. This year Music & Bits is hosting two tracks: a traditional conference-style track with thought leaders from the Music 2.0 space, and a mini-Music Hackday where developers can gather to hack on music APIs to build new and interesting apps.
The Echo Nest will be represented by founder and CTO Brian Whitman. He’ll be giving a keynote talk about the next generation of music search and discovery platform and how these platforms can recommend music or organize your catalog automatically by listening to it, predict which countries to launch your band’s next tour or even help you build synthesizers that play from the entire world of music. It looks to be a really cool talk during a really interesting conference. Wish I were there.
This video from last year gives a taste of what Music & Bits is like:
Music Machinery 