Be sure to check out the new MIR blog Divisible by Zero by Queen Mary PhD Student Rebecca Stewart.  Becky is particularly interested in using spatial audio techniques to enhance music discovery.    I find her first post You want the third song on the left to be quite interesting.   She’s using a spatially-enabled database to manage fast lookups of similar tracks that have been positioned in a 2D space using LDMS. This is a really neat idea.   It turns a problem that can be particularly vexing into a simple SQL query.

I hope Becky will continue to write about this project in her blog. I’m particularly interested in learning how well the spatial database scales to industrial-sized music collections, what her query times are and how the LDMS/GIS similarity compare to results using a brute force nearest neighbor distance calculation on the feature vectors.   – (via Ben Fields)