notes.variogr.am

The Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint (ENMFP)

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:10:52 -0400

Tomorrow begins MHD Amsterdam and at it The Echo Nest is releasing a few new things. Some of our engineering team (who deserve a severe callout for all their work, let me stick with their codenames) have been working tirelessly to get “songs” to be a first-class member of our API, and as of today, they are — we now track many millions of songs and you can query for them by name and receive all sort of useful metadata, get similar songs (with amazing results even very deep in the catalog), and even get free (legal) playable audio for a huge collection of major label content (more on this later.) As part of this push to provide data about songs, we have been working on a music fingerprint— a way to resolve an unknown audio file (what we call a “track”) to a large database to identify it in our world (as a “song.”) And we’re ready to release this to the community to see how it performs in the wild.

The design goals of our FP were to base it on Echo Nest audio features, to make it simple to implement and to make it as open as possible. Lock in of content resolution data is a terrible thing, and a large part of The Echo Nest’s focus is to make it easy for people to figure out what their music is about without getting stuck in ID space hell. If you have an iTunes collection and want to automatically make Spotify playlists, we should be able to help you. If you write an app that scans your hard drive for tracks to make great recommendations against MOG or the Limewire store, we should be able to help you. If you want the tempo of every song in someone’s terribly labeled iPod library, we should be able to help you. A fingerprint to us is a utility call— like our search_artists — a way to resolve a music identifier to our set of ID spaces. Echo Nest song IDs, if you choose to use them, give you all of our stuff “for free” — from a single EN SO ID you can get recommendations, artist pictures and bios, blog posts, record reviews, and of course all the audio analysis: the tempo, key, events in the song. But over this year we are rolling in support for any other ID space via Rosetta Stone, so you will be able to return Spotify IDs or get last.fm URLs of the song from the fingerprint. Our goal as always is to be the bridge between music and amazing applications— a platform for music intelligence that lets anyone use any service on any audio to discover and interact with music.

How it works

Our fingerprint is called the Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint (ENMFP) and is based directly on parts of our audio analysis engine that already powers tons of interactive music and music search apps across the globe. We get a detailed understanding of what is happening in a song (note: a song, not just an audio file) for “free” simply by having Tristan be our co-founder, so our work on the ENMFP started there. We worked with audio scientists on ways to scalably hash parts of the analysis and query for “codes” — a sequence of numbers that can match the same song to the ear. We identified an efficient series of transformations of our low level segment description data to make a very accurate code, and our engineering team built a suite of tests, backend servers, and a query API. The ENMFP comes in two parts. The code generator is a binary library that you can compile into your own app. It takes in a buffer of PCM samples (in practice, give it around 20 seconds of 22050Hz mono float PCM), runs a series of signal processing algorithms on the samples, and returns a list of codes. It is as simple as

    Codegen * pCodegen = new Codegen(_pSamples, _NumberSamples, offset);
    for (uint i=0;igetNumCodes();i++)
        printf("%ld ", pCodegen->getCodes()[i]);

The server maintains a canonical list of songs with corresponding codes and performs fast lookup. We’ve based the server on some popular open source indexing and storage platforms, and we’ll be releasing our modifications to them as a reference implementation shortly.

Use and open nature

Almost all of this implementation is open. The data behind the server is open by design. Anyone can request full data dumps. Anyone that wants to run their own server can provided that they mirror with the other servers. The only non-normative license is in the code generator, which for now is binary-only, available for most platforms (Windows, Linux 32 & 64-bit, Mac OS X, mobile forthcoming) and free to use in any sort of application — commercial, open source, free, webapp, etc. The only pertinent restriction is that codes are sent to only “authorized servers.” The design of this license ensures that one party does not attempt to usurp the ID resolving space out from under anyone. If The Echo Nest dissolves or gets bought by a large fish cannery on accident, we want to make sure the data and query service live on without us. As a corollary, we don’t want anyone “hiding” new resolved tracks from the ID space. Anyone that collects new songs via this fingerprint has to share their data, plain and simple. This hopefully ensures that over the years the combined knowledge from all uses of the ENMFP will catalog every single piece of music available on the internet, and the data will be available to all. We want the ENMFP to grow into a public internet utility.

Features

The ENMFP looks at the underlying music, not just the raw audio signal. This gives it some unique advantages:
- Unlike many FPs, is robust to time scaling
- Can identify sample use in mixed audio
- Can identify remixes, live versions and sometimes cover versions
Can identify a song in <20s of audio
Can also match on track metadata (artist name, title, length) using Echo Nest name matching in the same call
Server and some of the code generator are completely open source
Data is completely open; dumps provided, mirroring required to host your own server (we want people to boot their own copies of the data)

Anti-features

In heavy alpha, not heavily QA’d yet, help wanted
Not completely OSS: the code generator relies on proprietary EN algorithms. Binaries provided, free to use, but not open source.
No ingestion API yet (you are querying against a large but not complete catalog, there is no way currently to add new songs. This is changing soon. If you maintain a large catalog and want it in our reference database, please get in touch.)

How to use

First, you need an Echo Nest developer API key if you don’t already have one. Next, familiarize yourself with the alpha_identify_song API. (As of right now, before we release the server source, the Echo Nest is hosting the only query server via this API.) There is instructions there on how to receive the libcodegen binaries. The libcodegen package also ships with an example code generator that you can call from the commandline, so no worries if you aren’t ready to do some compiling.

How to help

We see the ENMFP as a community project just getting started. If you are interested in booting your own mirror server, or if you have experience with FP tasks, want to help with QA, automated testing, have a large catalog to ingest or test against, please get in touch.

we are especially grateful for the work of Unrepentant Nagios Installer (UNI), Guy Who Fights With Me About the Word “Track” Every Fucking Day (GWFWMAWTEFD), Drinks Turret Coolant (DTC), Mr. HTML5 Canvas 2010 (HC2), So-Glad-I-Kept-You-Out-Of-The-Media-Lab (SGIKYOOTML), Skinny Tie (ST), Main Ontology Offender (MOO), Future Performable Employee (FPE), and of course Ben Lacker (BL)

Video

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:18:59 -0500

Primer on new Echo Nest search_tracks, capsule, and get_analysis APIs

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:45:00 -0500

Note: if you are interested in these APIs know that they are no longer alpha — see our new Song APIs for the latest information. At Stockholm Hack Day we’re announcing three or four new APIs that are going to stay in our “alpha” sandbox for now. These are officially unsupported but we will work with anyone who has a use case for them. For now, the instructions will stay here until we promote them to production APIs.

For all of these alpha APIs you will need a developer key from The Developer Nest. I will use “YOUR_KEY” as the key in the examples, make sure to replace this or none of the calls will work. We reserve the right to pull or throttle access to alpha APIs at a different rate from the supported ones. Please be warned that these are not production ready, we will be making enhancements and restarting servers, there will be guaranteed downtime. If you are interested in building a product with these new APIs please contact us..

capsule
get_analysis
search_tracks
identify_track

capsule

What: returns a rendered mp3 and swf url given an XSPF playlist that is composed of a “megamix” or “jam” of the included tracks in order.

How:

http://developer.echonest.com/api/alpha_capsule?api_key=YOUR_KEY&xspf_url=http://path_to.com/playlist.xspf

Returns

{'flash_url': 'http://thisismyjam.com/flash/jam.swf?api_PNWUcuxGJ5/1264353117.xml', 
'tag': 'api_PNWUcuxGJ5', 
'mp3_url': 'http://echonest-capsule.s3.amazonaws.com/api_PNWUcuxGJ5/1264353117.mp3'}

Parameters:

api_key - your developer nest key. Required
xspf_url - a resolvable url to an XSPF file. Required.
tag - string to use instead of randomly generated.
transition - in seconds, length of transition
duration - in seconds, length of each song playback

Returns:

flash_url - a url to a flash player similar to This is My Jam
mp3_url - a url to a playable mp3 file
tag - code used to check for existence of capsule.

Notes:

Capsules take time to render. An average 10 song capsule with the default transition and duration will take 45 seconds. To see if the capsule is ready, you can test the mp3_url for a status code. 403 means it is not ready. 200 means it is.

get_analysis

DEPRECATED 4/23/10 — GO HERE

What: returns the entire analysis for an Echo Nest track ID. (more ID types to come soon.) Saves multiple calls (get_segments, get_tempo, etc etc) and allows you to get the analysis of tracks you did not upload (after finding them with search_tracks.)

How:

DEPRECATED 4/23/10 — use songs/search with the audio_summary bucket to get the full analysis for a song

http://developer.echonest.com/api/alpha_get_analysis?api_key=YOUR_KEY&trackID=TRMAOUK1254889A145

Returns

{"status": "OK", "analysis": 
	{"bars": [{"duration": 0.75963000000000003, "start": 0.37046000000000001, 
	...

Parameters:

api_key - your developer nest key. Required
trackID - an Echo Nest track ID starting with TR. Required

Returns:

analysis - the entire Echo Nest audio analysis in json.

Notes:

The json responses are large. Be careful.

search_tracks

DEPRECATED 4/23/10 — use songs/search for this

What: Given a number of possible query types return a list of matching tracks that The Echo Nest maintains. Search on metadata (artist, title), audio data (tempo, duration, loudness, key, mode, etc), cultural data (automatically computed tags, aka “topterms”, familiarity and hotttnesss, collated edited style and genre classifications, etc.) and even location data (latitude / longitude of artist origin.)

How:

DEPRECATED 4/23/10 — GO HERE

Look for a song:
http://developer.echonest.com/api/alpha_search_tracks?api_key=YOUR_KEY&title=My%20Sound&artist=Squarepusher

Get the loudest romantic song:
http://developer.echonest.com/api/alpha_search_tracks?api_key=YOUR_KEY&query=romantic&sort=-loudness&results=1

Get the songs between two tempos:
http://developer.echonest.com/api/alpha_search_tracks?api_key= YOUR_KEY&constraint_tempo_min=120&constraint_tempo_max=125&artist=Squarepusher


Returns
{"status": "ok", "results": 
	[{"trackID": "TRMAOUK1254889A145", "title": "Dream On", "artist": "Aerosmith"},
	...

Parameters:

api_key - your developer nest key. Required
title - Song title
artist - Artist name
query - Full text query of description (“funky jazz”, “romantic”, “heavy metal”)
results - number of results to return, maximum 100, default 20
constraint_tempo_max - Maximum tempo in beats per minute
constraint_tempo_min - Minimum tempo in beats per minute
constraint_duration_max - Maximum duration in seconds
constraint_duration_min - Minimum duration in seconds
constraint_loudness_max - Maximum average song loudness in dB
constraint_loudness_min - Minimum average song loudness in dB
constraint_familiarity_max - Maximum artist familiarity
constraint_familiarity_min - Minimum artist familiarity
constraint_hotttnesss_max - Maximum artist hotttnesss
constraint_hotttnesss_min - Minimum artist hotttnesss
constraint_mode - Only allow major (1) or minor (0) modes in results
constraint_key - Only allow key (0-11, C to B) in results
constraint_latitude_min, constraint_longitude_min, constraint_latitude_max, constraint_longitude_max - Only allow these locations in results
sort - sort results by parameter: for example &sort=-tempo will sort by tempo decreasing. &sort=+tempo will sort by tempo increasing. &sort=-longtiude will sort by longitude decreasing. Also supported: latitude, key, mode, loudness, duration, familiarity, hotttnesss.

Returns:

trackID - the Echo Nest track ID.
artistID - the Echo Nest artist ID (for use with other EN APIs
artist, title - track metadata
tempo, duration, mode, loudness, key - if used as a sort or constraint these parameters will appear in results as well per track. Otherwise you can use get_analysis.

Notes:

This is a heavily alpha API that will have some serious issues but we welcome all feedback.
Textual queries do not return their matching terms in results
Geographic queries do not return their matching locations in results
If you put a + sign (%2B) in front of an artist or title it will force a match, otherwise it won’t. You can use quotes in artist, title and query parameters for proximity, aka artist=”Britney Spears”

identify_track

DEPRECATED 4/23/10 — use songs/alpha_identify_song

What: Returns metadata for a track given Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint hash codes.

Notes:

Not currently public. Talk to Brian for access to the code generator and API.

Moonbelly

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:32:16 -0500

Geocoded place names mentioned in the entirety of “40 Stories”, via Google Books, some sort of future library that no one talks about as we are too scared of it:

Moonbelly sang a new song called “The System Cannot Withstand Close Scrutiny.”

The system cannot withstand close scrutiny
The system cannot withstand close scrutiny
The system cannot withstand close scrutiny
The system cannot withstand close scrutiny
Etc.

—City Life, Donald Barthelme

KFW’s excellent “Modena” video.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:19:00 -0500

KFW’s excellent “Modena” video.

(via meaninglesssyllables) RIP Jack Rose, 1971-2009. Please, if...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:43:05 -0500

(via meaninglesssyllables)

RIP Jack Rose, 1971-2009. Please, if you can, put on “Kensington Blues” for me.

I hate you, internet

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:36:43 -0500

I hate you, internet

The Echo Nest Remix API talk at Dorkbot NYC, March 4th 2009

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:15:37 -0500

About nine months ago I gave a funny talk with my main man Douglas at his world-dominating Dorkbot NYC about Echo Nest Remix. Slideshare’s not so good with the audio part of things so it may be kinda dry, but here it is:

The Echo Nest Remix at Dorkbot NYC, March 4 2009

I remembered to post it because Paul made something hilarious with it today in just a few lines of code. I really think Remix should get more love; I’m on it, and some new Echo Nest features are coming out that will make it even more interesting.

A Singular Christmas (2004)

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:33:50 -0500

Five years ago today I released “A Singular Christmas,” the rendered output of a piece of software that listened to hundreds of Christmas songs and tried to compose its own new holiday standards. It ended up as my most successful thing ever by a few orders of magnitude: 600,000 people downloaded it over the space of three weeks. I was on BBC Radio on Christmas Eve; Wired Magazine tried to arrange a photograph of me at a club performing on top of a rack of servers; Pitchfork reviewed it well. Quite parenthetically, “A Singular Christmas” has been to date the last major piece of music I worked on: the weird excitement behind it was my main driver for turning down “safe” jobs to start The Echo Nest with Tristan a few months later, and that enterprise has changed my priorities in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

While I’m sure the vast majority of those hundreds of thousands heard just the first few seconds of the first song before closing their browser, I quite liked “A Singular Christmas” (I can say this because the computer made it, not me!) and each holiday season I’ll get a few nice emails from likeminded people reminiscing about it and asking where to listen to it. As I was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab when I made the record, every single year since the release— in between board meetings and key-value store rebuilds or whatever the hell it is I do with myself these days— I’ve had to ask a current student to find the computer that it was hosted on and plug it back in as a new consortium or robot displaces the latest server closet there constantly. But I’ve had it with self-hosting, this year I am going to the cloud — my blog here at Tumblr can take care of the adjoining text while my good friends at SoundCloud are graciously hosting the audio. Maybe it’ll stay up for more than a week.

Enjoy, happy holidays, please write, xo, -b

Listen and download
Statement & Methodology
Historical errata, links, etc

Listen and download

A Singular Christmas by bwhitman

If you want to download the whole thing as a .zip file, here you are, it’s 61MB.

Statement and Methodology

Holiday music is the first broadcast of the season. Much like the sudden alert of spring birds, the forces that schedule, produce and filter Christmas hymns from back catalogues and metal shelves in storage lockers out to 8 inch mono white grilled speakers beamformed onto precisely calculated endcaps are a fantastic mystery that is never asked to reveal itself. The truth is surely offensive, some pressed shirt with a copy of SPSS pastes the predicted launch dates and harmonies into a memo and forwards it to General Marketing. I’ve seen their mood circumplex for every chromatic jingle plotted over revenue– it’s in a Microsoft Office 95 file, the fonts look awful and only prints on legal paper. Rest assured that they’ve ran the numbers– they have the data. It’s the only genre that lets musicologists and A&R guys sit in the same room.

As a result, whether we participate or not, we are trained to associate the march from car to heated revolving door, from family pie to adjoint family pie, from ghost tree stand caravans to footprints of dry brown needles leading to the trash in January with the twee pasture of treble and tines and abrupt key modulation, led along on our heartstrings by wooden horses. X, you, times n, a projection through some unknown (until now) auditory stimulus, equals Y, a fond memory of everyone in a sweater. X and Y jitter irretrievably and tragically over the years, but n, static and full bandwidth, holds them together. I always liked to think of every sound, every instrument, every vocal phoneme and every delay tail in Phil Spector’s classic “A Christmas Gift For You” as some hidden variable linking some version of me to some imperceptible holiday memory. Played as it is, it’s every holiday I’ve had and still holidays I’ve yet to experience.

So then what is special about Christmas music? Let’s take the nativist view– that there is something in the composition, construction, timbre or production in every popular Christmas song that makes it fit into the genre. Some predefined, baked in, Chomsky grammar style language of melodies and instruments. So play a Christmas song to someone who’s never experienced a Christmas before. What do they feel? Do they rush out and buy spray-on snow? I never got around to doing the study. What I could do is try to distill holiday music down to its barest essentials. My hypothesis was that if we could figure out the dominant components of Christmas music, and train a system looking only at the audio to make more of it from those components, and if that new music passes the Turing test of the general public considering it Christmas music, then yes, we’ve cracked the code — we can have Holiday Forever, a Singular Christmas.

Sheba and Kristie in front of the rack of servers used to render A Singular Christmas.
MIT Media Lab, November 2004

The recipe for generating this Eigenmusic (”synthesized music representing the maximal variety of the input music”) was cooked up in 2003 as the live radio station “Eigenradio.” It was a hilarious joke if you laughed at beehives, pleasing if you liked electric closets. Here’s what the process is: you parameterize music into some set of features (pitch content, frequency response, high level structure, etc) and set some rate — say a set of features every 100 milliseconds or four beats. You then pass those series of features to a popular statistical algorithm that tries to remove dependence among variables in the feature– removing “redundant” information– perceptual compression. Repetitive structures such as beat and harmony are whittled down to a representation that can always expand back later.

With this new compressed representation we have some powerful new tools. We can reduce two songs and see how close their representations are– since we’ve removed some unimportant noisy stuff it works better than comparing the whole slow song. We can also tweak the representation and play it back again. Dehydrate a tune into two numbers, you’ll probably get a measure of loudness and some measure of the most dominant low frequency, these are now synthesizer knobs you can tweak and compose around.

The fun stuff happens when you take more than one song, compress them all as a unit, and then re-create the original again, play it back. What you’ve got is the computer trying to spin around all the things it heard that it thought were important about lots of music. But always remember– what a computer thinks is redundant are the very things we rely on musical enjoyment- repetition, patterns, harmonies, beat — and what it thinks are important are things we would never want to listen to alone.

So A Singular Christmas is the reduction of dozens of holiday songs, from grim coffee shop collections to poorly recorded indie one-offs. Dozens of holiday records went into the machine, and out came the sixteen tracks you can hear today. We synthesized those tracks by randomly permuting those tweakable knobs over two weeks of sixteen computers blithely ignoring any real work; each one rendered about a dozen New Holiday Classics. As for the role of composer, maybe semi-conductor– I locked myself and family up in a darkened studio on the top floor at MIT, we turned up the speakers, played every track in a row, and I hovered my index finger over the Delete key. There’s not a single window in that place, but I’m sure it started snowing.

— September 2006, Somerville MA

Historical errata

Walter Horn did a pretty good email interview with me in mid-2005 about Eigenradio and A Singular Christmas. I go into greater detail about both.
A very excited man on Canadian radio [MP3]
Review in Pitchfork by Drew Daniel
Not-so-positive review in Salon
The .zip file of all the tracks comes with this “cover art.”

A Singular Christmas (ASC) started as an experiment meant to go in my dissertation to see if a computer could determine automatically if a song is a holiday song. It’s actually a very hard task and I really hope MIREX takes it up sometime. Like most things I gave up on the science part once I realized how pretty the inversions were.

The original thank-you line on ASC’s webpage is gone, but I bet it said: “Kelly Dobson, Victor Adan, Barry Vercoe, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Dan Ellis.” Dan especially, as his MQ-resynthesis matlab code was crucial to the enterprise. KFW provided a large % of the sample bank known as “all Possible Sounds” that ASC rendered from; Kelly was a big help with editing, sequencing and general art inspiration; Barry of course as my advisor foot the institutional “bill” for the computers and is somewhat a personal hero of mine; Victor I am sure paced around a lot and told me how much better it could have been if I embodied Schenkerian analysis into the algorithm.

My personal favorite on this record is the last track, “Holy Night,” which is a bit different from the rest. As a test I only trained it on versions of “Silent Night” in the collection. The output— sort of a 90 second vamp on three notes in a verse with the “orchestra” spinning around it trying to anneal in— is to me everything that is beautiful about this sort of automatic music.

Music Hack Day Boston

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:21:32 -0500

Last weekend I was happy to be a part of Music Hack Day Boston. The Echo Nest co-organized it and sponsored it; I sat on a panel, helped with some “local coordination,” put up some awesome people at my place nearby, and generally did everything but make a hack myself. (I tried, really.)

Below is an unordered list of “things I learned” last weekend.

Elissa is a force of nature

While everyone has already thanked the amazing Paul Lamere from the Echo Nest, Jon Pierce from Betahouse / Awesome Foundation and Dave Haynes from Soundcloud for their organization help, I need to publicly declare on the entire internets that while I’m really happy for them and i’ma let them finish, but Elissa Barrett (Echo Nest’s marketing / director of all things) was the best music hack day organizer of all time. Just because she doesn’t tweet or get up all in the social webs doesn’t mean we can’t give her props for all the work she did— from booking all the bands to wrangling the scheduling to taking the thousands of boxes of uneaten sandwiches to the homeless shelter she really made Boston MHD possible.

last.fm are awesome

Seriously, it was hell of inspiring watching those dudes all get on so well after such a long time even after a few are moving on to awesome things. I can only hope that in 4 years I can still make fun of Paul for his terrible puns without him trying to deck me. Matt, David, James, RJ, toby, etc.. all serious “super music” players and they made it work because they believed in it. Much respect.

Playdar is going to be something

Playdar, “the content resolver with a series of questions” was a huge presence at the MHD, starting with a “Playdar Summit” at the Echo Nest office on Friday, which kind of went like this:

The whole crew was there, J Herskowitz, Toby, RJ, the Twones guys, James, a few EN guys, the two Lucases, Dan from AOL… The Echo Nest is getting involved in Playdar in some hopefully useful way very soon, it obviously fits in our general attitude on how music should get found and shared and thought about.

The Echo Nest needs to do a better job explaining itself

17 of the 41 hack day projects used Echo Nest APIs, including all 3 top winners, almost all of them from our Analyze product. We do a lot @ EN, perhaps a little too much. A couple of projects used our (awesome) get_similar artists call, and one used our new get_images call. But no one even thought about or touched our feeds (get_reviews, get_blogs) stuff, which probably constitutes 60% of EN engineering time. Of course, we sell that stuff to non-hack-day companies and the text in those documents are the basis of a lot of our recommender / similarity results, but still… if the future of music is sitting in this room and they don’t want to make an app that uses our crawl data, we should think a bit about what that means.

Automatic music is going to be big next year

My old colleague Rif did an excellent a-from-b style remix using some math that sounded quite pleasant. Rob O won the entire hack day with his outlierfm.com project.

I briefly mentioned this on the panel I sat on, but music remixing / automated mashup / easy creation tools are going to start popping up a lot more. EN is obviously invested in this via Remix and it was good to see similar things like Indaba and Aviary appear at MHD, but are all still a relatively dorky proposition. The first easy to use auto-remixer that is not designed by a crazy person will be amazing.

Hack Days need to be technology-focused

I speak for myself, but MHD is not MIDEM, it’s not the Pho list or SXSW, it’s not some PRO-sponsored junket where we talk about rights issues. It’s a bunch of excited people trying to code out new ways to get people excited about music. We can deal with the monetization, licensing and business models later. This makes me a bit of a hypocrite since I sat on one but the less panels at the next one, the better. More time for API workshops, soldering, meeting people, less time listening to (interesting) people delivering opinions to an assembled crowd.

Of course no one was forced to go to the panels and I do appreciate that the panels bring in some non-hacker types in the audience to even things out but perhaps a good model for the next MHD is to do these “business things” (lightning talks, panels, keynote sessions) on a completely different day from the hack day(s).

Anthony slightly touched on this in his blog post — the Boston MHD people did a great job here but I think it should go even farther towards technology.

Late edit because I’ve already gotten two DMs about “why I hated the panels” — I didn’t, I thought they were great (especially Chris Dahlen’s moderation of the discovery panel and Derek’s amazing comments during the music biz one.) But I don’t think they belong in a scheduled session during a hack day. The urge to see these great people is too strong and gets in the way of doing stuff. Schedule them after final demos for the next one, everyone is happy.

My favorite “hacks”

Hypeify by bennettk, a “music startup name generator.” Always a laugh especially when you see a few actual names scroll by.
EchoNestLive won our special prize for best EN hack — it was a connector between Live through MAX/MSP to EN to analyze and then filter tracks by tempo, pitch, timbre etc in real time. Very cool sounding demo, hopefully they put up a video or something soon.
DJ Hot Scene hooked into Traktor and showed pictures from the EN get_images API of the currently playing track to project at the club. Simple thing, looked and worked great.
Ben Lacker’s “More Cowbell” with an actual “classically trained” servomotor (I see my employees are already making fun of me)

"I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:12:00 -0500

“I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

- my man cormac in this excellent interview

(although i would assert that writing short stories can also take years of your life / drive you insane)

KFW @ On Land, Sep 19 2009

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:37:41 -0500

Live Generator (1) @ On Land by kfw

This is really amazing. It is Liz Mitchell (who later went on to...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:02:44 -0500

This is really amazing. It is Liz Mitchell (who later went on to be the lead singer of “Boney M” of all things) doing the classic “Motherless Child” on what looks to be a German pop TV programme in the early 70s. But the video appears to be an “amateur kinescope” that looks strangely digital, with frame cuts and tracking issues. The timing and quality is way off for this to be an actual kinescope, but maybe someone in Germany recorded this with a film camera pointed at their TV? Fits the music beautifully.

Porting over the archive...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:45:07 -0400

I had a lot of posts sitting in the old Wordpressy blog that is due for a huge SQL injection attack some day soon, so I thought I’d drag the kittens out of the burning house while I could. I backdated them so they are at the end, but here’s some permalinks if you want to read them:

The Rainer Buchty Ratio [oft-referenced mathematical model]
Pushpin is Real [true tales of failed but popular product]
Armed Forces in Alphabetical Order [still angry about bad metadata]
Prediction […]

More to come from the vaults…

Highlights of Last Week At Music and Bits

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:49:38 -0400

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Music and Bits conference in Amsterdam last week that kicked off the Amsterdam Dance Event.

The talk

The morning of my speaking slot, I lost my voice. Those reading this know I don’t speak much to begin with (unless severely inspired.) After practicing saying “eigenvector” five times in a row fast and failing (I’ve heard this is how Coldplay’s Chris Martin prepares for concerts), I quickly ran upstairs to add text to all my slides to make sure I could at least get some sort of message across. My fellow academics know, during the Brian Whitman Talk Experience you get something akin to a church revival and rant session.

The Echo Nest at Music and Bits, October 21 2009

What the slides on screen don’t properly get across is all the amazing sounds and applications that people have made so far with Echo Nest technologies. Thousands of resourceful creative people are throwing away most notions of what “music” and “discovery” means to really collectively figure out what is next in our world, and we are helping them.

For the first time as company co-founder (it’s been over four very long, sometimes incredibly trying years, and this on top of a very intense six years in academia) I am starting to see something very big and inspiring come together. We’re a weird company — no real “consumer” facing products, so very few people know what we do, and the stuff we do is strange enough to get stopped at the border and have hilariously mistranslated explanations. But we have an amazing team, some of the best products in the music space, and quite a lot of our work is in letting people simply know what is possible.

So I enjoyed the mostly surprised but happy audience of people as I played them a sample of 2004’s “A Singular Christmas” or Rob Watson’s hilarious Donk DJ and others’ similarity graphs, visualizations, large social nets using our stuff to avoid awful CF traps — and basked in knowing the company’s amazing near future (which I did not reveal.) We still have a lot to work on but we’ve crossed a lot of important milestones towards getting a new kind of music interaction into the world.

Highlights

I was so excited to be able to see my friend Oren play with Robbie Avenaim at Bimhuis as part of the Dance Event; Robbie on drums and servomotor-controlled drums and Oren on guitar and synth. A very special concert that someone helpfully recorded the final three minutes of:

At Bimhuis I ran into C of This is My Jam fame. C (aka Christian D) made some of the best jams even before the site actually was released. We “used” C as an example of the nascent music creators as listeners prototype in many a slide and talk, he put so much love into ordering his favorite music.

It was good to reflect just a little bit (but apparently reflection is not a pastime in Amsterdam), and since my voice was shot it was easy to just watch and listen. My best time during the trip was on a boat docked somewhere with the favorite person I had met at the conference who then introduced me to a refreshingly perpendicular (non-music) group of brilliant people, staring at the water as the sun went down and not once discussing licensing issues or marking our exact location on foursquare … I am kind of sighing just looking at the picture (the window out my office goes to a nice tree with a squirrel-friend that visits me, but then behind that tree is a busy bus lane.)

Another personal highlight was meeting someone that had used my insane child software “Hedgehog” back in 1999, a Palm MIDI sequencer. I had always applied the Rainer Buchty Ratio to Hedgehog and just assumed no one ever used it. You’ll have to bear with me on this one, this is kind of like Richard Davies posting letters from the dude from the Clientele ten years later…

Then the ridiculous parties & shows…

Although I could not get enough time to really talk (I was absolutely mute two straight days,) it was good at least to whisper to my soon to be new friends at Soundcloud, last.fm, RJDJ, Twones, Justin from muxtape, old friends like Volodkin (hype machine), Steve, (ex-imeem) and etc. What I like the best about the music internet people is that we all seem to be open for everything and anything, there is no competitive nature about anyone, we all are focused on making amazing things happen. The first conversations always started with, “OK, you do this, and we do this, why don’t we put this with this and … ”

and especially yes let us not forget

Joris (and oscar) from Eindhoven!! (we met at MIDEM in January and they had a new demo.) Future of music, people… this is their new thing, Jukebugs:

The organizers who pulled this together this did an amazing trick. Thanks to the entire MnB crew: Edial, Vincent, Tim, Roel, each of them great people individually, and everyone else involved. Should do it again….

Video

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:05:34 -0400

Music and Bits

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:18:28 -0400

I’ll be at the Music and Bits conference in Amsterdam next week that kicks off the excellent Amsterdam Dance Event. There’s talks all day on the 21st and also a hack day that EN is supporting. I’ll be sharing the stage with some serious players: Soundcloud, Justin from Muxtape, RjDj, Last.fm, VOLODKIN …

I’m most excited that STEIM will be there during the hack day: I had a wonderful time there earlier this year and I now know where the best coffee places are, so I won’t waste any time looking.

I’ll post my talk when I get back.

Hadn’t opened a DAW in a while, this is what greeted me...

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:21:28 -0400

Hadn’t opened a DAW in a while, this is what greeted me — the Sculpture synth from Logic 9. It’s fascinating that in the last ten years synthesizers evolved into toddlers’ busy boxes, or maybe Radio Shack 500-in-1 electronics kits. Wondering who or what is driving the features and design: I don’t see anything here either in UI or DSP that couldn’t have been done with 1999 technology — the growth has nothing to do with ability; so it’s some other external customer request, or the more bitter explanation of marketing flotsam.

Hopefully I can pull together a retrospective of VST plugin UIs and features over the years.

Install python MySQL (MySQLdb) in Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:51:12 -0400

I hate MySQL but I have some … employees … who think it’s a perfectly fine solution when you don’t want to boot a Solr server. Savages. Anyway, of course I expected the MySQLdb connector in Python to totally break and it did not disappoint. You’re dealing with a 64-bit version of Python now and a computer that gets confused as to its architecture (why does /usr/bin/arch return i386 when gcc outputs x86_64 by default?)

Here’s what you do:

Download the Mac OS X 10.5 x86_64 version of MySQL. You need the 64-bit one. Get the package format installer, it’s easy. Run the installer.
Add /usr/local/mysql/bin to your PATH and add the ARCHFLAGS variable to your environment. I always edit /etc/bashrc, you can also use ~/.bash_profile if you want. But you need both environment variables. Something like:
```
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin
export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"
```
Download the latest source version of MySQL-python. It should end in .tar.gz. Right now it’s 1.2.3c1. Unpack it and run sudo python setup.py install. You don’t need to do anything with commenting out uints anymore like you did in Leopard.

The SmartQ

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:45:01 -0400

Leonard sent over a must-have inclusion to my Small but powerful devices that run your code roundup, the SmartQ 5 (dealextreme link, please heed my warning about at least 30 day ship times.)

I’ll fill in the chart later this week. Still not sure if I’ll get one on order as nothing I have in my project queue needs a touchscreen. But the specs/price coefficient looks amazing: 800x480 touchscreen (4.3” diagonal), 667MHz ARM11, 128MB RAM, sound out and mic in (the mic is under debate, but a couple of people claim to have used it… worst case you hook a $9 USB mic in there), USB host and slave, Wifi & bluetooth (!), 1GB Flash built in w/ SD card slot, battery, boots into linux… for $151 shipped to the US. That’s cheaper than an iPod touch and you don’t have to deal with the OS That Hates You (OS X Mobile.)

Downsides Zagat style: performance is often “spotty” .. there is no “dedicated GPU or graphics SoC” .. the touchscreen is “annoying” .. you get what “you pay for.” (But really, you can’t pay for much less than this.)

There’s also the 7” screen SmartQ 7 which seems to be the same specs as the 5 except the screen. Long review of that here. Seems to go for $220 or so. The only relatively reasonable importer I could find.

At this point I am sighing in retrospect a bit at The DSP Music Syndicate (a club where I proudly claim membership) — we made beautiful sounds using Ethan’s SynDevKit on a board that cost the Media Lab roughly $400 each and we had to surface mount solder each one (a process that took many hours, which really made drowning one in concrete a bit excessive.) Now I can import a few of these for the same price; writing music for it is easier, there’s a gorgeous display, other people can have them too. It was really only a few years ago.