Posts Tagged remix
Beat Rotation Experiments
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, research, The Echo Nest on May 29, 2009
Doug Repetto, researcher at Columbia University (and founder of dorkbot), has been taking the Echo Net Remix API for a spin. Doug is interested in how beat displacement and re-ordering affects the perception of different kinds of music. To kick off his research, he’s created some really interesting beat rotation experiments. Here’s a couple of examples.
Rich Skaggs & Friends playing Bill Monroe, “Big Mon”, rotated so that the beats are in order 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1:
The same song rotated so that the beats are in order 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2 1 3 4 2:
This time rotated so that the beats are in order 1 3 4 2 1 2 3 4 1 3 4 2 1 2 3 4:
All 3 versions are musically interesting and sound different. I’m amazed at how music that sounds so complex can be manipulated so simply to give such interesting results. Doug has lots more examples of his experiments: rotational energy and centripetal force. If you are interested in computational remixology, it is worth checking out.
The Echo Nest remix 1.0 is released!
Posted by Paul in code, fun, Music, remix, The Echo Nest, web services on May 12, 2009
Version 1.0 of the Echo Nest remix has been released. Echo Nest Remix is an open source SDK for Python that lets you write programs that manipulate music. For example, here’s a python function that will take all the beats of a song, and reverse their order:
def reverse(inputFilename, outputFilename):
audioFile = audio.LocalAudioFile(inputFilename)
chunks = audioFile.analysis.beats
chunks.reverse()
reversedAudio = audio.getpieces(audioFile, chunks)
reversedAudio.encode(outputFilename)
When you apply this to a song by The Beatles you get something that sounds like this:
which is surprisingly recognizable, musical – and yet different from the original.
Quite a few web apps have been written that use remix. One of my favorites is DonkDJ, which will ‘put a donk‘ on any song. Here’s an example: Hung Up by Madonna (with a Donk on it):
This is my jam lets you create mini-mixes to share with people.
And where would the web be without the ability to add more cowbell to any song.
There’s lots of good documentation already for remix. Adam Lindsay has created a most excellent overview and tutorial for remix. There’s API documentation and there’s documentation for the underlying Echo Nest web services that perform the audio analysis. And of course, the source is available too.
So, if you are looking for that fun summer coding project, or if you need an excuse to learn Python, or perhaps you are a budding computational remixologist download remix, grab an API key from the Echo Nest and start writing some remix code.
Here’s one more example of the fun stuff you can do with remix. Guess the song, and guess the manipulation:
79 Versions of Popcorn, remixed.
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on May 1, 2009
Aaron Meyer’s issued a challenge for someone to remix 79 versions of the song Popcorn. So I fired up one of the remix applications that Tristan and Brian wrote a while back that uses our remix API to stitch all 79 versions of Popcorn together into one 12 minute track – songs are beat matched, tempos are stretched and beats are aligned to form a single seamless (well, almost seamless) version of the Hot Buttered classic. I’m interested to hear what some of the other computational remixologists could do with this challenge. Everyone, stop writing your thesis, and make some popcorn!
Listen:
Download: A Kettle of Echo Nest Popcorn.
If you are interested in creating your own remix, check out the Echo Nest API and the Echo Nest Remix SDK. (Thanks Andy, for the tip!).
Put a DONK on it
Posted by Paul in code, fun, Music, The Echo Nest on March 25, 2009
rfwatson has just released a site called donkdj that will ‘remix your favourite song into a bangin’ hard dance anthem‘. You upload a track and donkdj turns it into a dance remix. The results are just brilliant. Here are a few examples:
The site uses The Echo Nest Remix API to do all of the heavy lifting – adding a kick, snap, claps and the infamous donk (I had to look it up … a donk is a a pipe/plank-sound, that is used in Bouncy/scouse house/NRG music). What is doubly cool is rfwatson has open sourced his remix code so you can look under the hood and see how it works and adapt it for your own use. The core of this remix is done in just 200 lines of python code.
donkdj is really cool – the results sound fantastic and the open sourcing of the code makes it easy for anyone else to make their own remixer. I can’t wait to see it when someone makes an automatic Stephen Colbert remixer.
Update: Ben showed me this post that points to this video about Donk:
The full series is available here.
The Echo Nest Remix SDK
Posted by Paul in fun, Music, The Echo Nest on February 28, 2009
One of the joys of working at the Echo Nest is the communal music playlist. Anyone can add, rearrange or delete music from the queue. Of course, if you need to bail out (like when that Cindi Lauper track is sending you over the edge) you can always put on your headphones and tune out the mix. The other day, George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” started playing, but this was a new version – with a funky drum beat, that I had never heard before – perhaps this was a lost track from the Beatle’s Love? Nope, turns out it was just Ben, one of the Echo Nest developers, playing around with The Echo Nest Remix SDK.
The Echo Nest Remix SDK is an open source Python library that lets you manipulate music and video. It sits on top of the Echo Nest Analyze API, hides all of the messy details of sending audio back to the Echo Nest, and parsing the XML response, while still giving you access to the full power of the API.
remix – is one of The Echo Nest’s secret weapons – it gives you the ability to analyze and manipulate music – and not just audio manipulations such as filtering or equalizing, but the ability to remix based on the hierarchical structure of a song. remix sits on top of a very deep analysis of the music that teases out all sorts of information about a track. There’s high level information such as the key, tempo time signature, mode (major or minor) and overall loudness. There’s also information about the song structure. A song is broken down into sections (think verse, chorus, bridge, solo), bars, beats, tatums (the smallest perceptual metrical unit of the song) and segments (short, uniform sound entities). remix gives you access to all of this information.
I must admit that I’ve been a bit reluctant to use remix – mainly because after 9 years at Sun Microsystems I’m a hard core Java programmer (the main reason I went to Sun in the first place was because I liked Java so much). Every time I start to use Python I get frustrated because it takes me 10 times longer than it would in Java. I have to look everything up. How do I concatenate strings? How do I find the length of a list? How do I walk a directory tree? I can code so much faster in Java. But … if there was ever a reason for me to learn Python it is this remix SDK. It is just so much fun – and it lets you do some of the most incredible things. For example, if you want to add a cowbell to every beat in a song, you can use remix to get the list of all of the beats (and associated confidences) in a song, and simply overlap a cowbell strike at each of the time offsets.
So here’s my first bit of Python code using remix. I grabbed one of the code samples that’s included in the distribution, had the aforementioned Ben spend two minutes walking me through the subtleties of Audio Quantum and I was good to go. My first bit of code just takes a song and swaps beat two and beat three of all measures that have at least 3 beats.
def swap_beat_2_and_3(inputFile, outputFile):
audiofile = audio.LocalAudioFile(inputFile)
bars = audiofile.analysis.bars
collect = audio.AudioQuantumList()
for bar in bars:
beats = bar.children()
if (len(beats) >= 3):
(beats[1], beats[2]) = (beats[2], beats[1])
for beat in beats:
collect.append(beat);
out = audio.getpieces(audiofile, collect)
out.encode(outputFile)
The code analyzes the input, iterates through the bars and if a bar has more than three beats, swaps them. (I must admit, even as a hard core Java programmer, the ability to swap things with (a,b) = (b,a) is pretty awesome) and then encodes and writes out a new audiofile. The resulting audio is surprisingly musical. Here’s the result as applied to Maynard Ferguson’s “Birdland”:
This is just great programming fun. I think I’ll be spending my spare coding time learning more Python so I can explore all of the things one can do with remix.
Music Machinery 