Good News

Recently the following items have been posted on the music-ir list which I found interesting but haven't had time yet to blog about.

Mark Sandler announced that the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) has released Soundbite. It's a free playlist generation software which everyone can install on their own music collection. Given a seed song the software generates a playlist of similar songs. In addition, the software sends something like a fingerprint to C4DM's servers which they plan to use to generate recommendations. Mark writes: "and we're not saying what science we do because we'd like to see if you can guess." In terms of similarity I guess they are using Mark Levy's recent work. It's a fast and memory efficient approach and performs almost as good as some computationally much more expensive approaches. I'd love to give it a try, but unfortunately Soundbite currently only runs on Mac OS X.

Chris Cannem from the C4DM recently announced the release of Sonic Visualizer 1.0 which is a nice tool to visualize music (and has partially been developed within the legendary SIMAC project). The plugins include interesting algorithms such as: beat tracking, chromagram, constant Q spectrogram, tonal change detector, key estimation, onset detection, pitch tracking, note tracking, and tempo tracking.

Douglas Turnbull (also known for the MIR related and fun Listen Game) has announced that his team is making some of the data they collected available. In particular, they are offering the "CAL-500 data set of 1700 human-generated musical annotations that describe 500 popular western musical tracks". I haven't seen the data yet, but I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you could do with it.

And last, but not least: There is a new MIR related journal: the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies (JIMS). And guess where it is being published? Izmir :-) And the articles even got Turkish abstracts!