The Echo Nest on Techcrunch

The Echno Nest made it on Techcrunch!

Interestingly Techcrunch seems to think that The Echo Nest is about genre classification (second sentence in their blog post). I doubt they heard that from Brian.

One reader raised an interesting question: "[...] do we really need a computerized pandora?" It's nice to see something like this discussed outside of the music-ir mailing list!

I really like The Echo Nest's very open approach to demonstrate the technologies they got. Besides being of interest to anyone in MIR I'm sure it also makes it a lot easier to attract interest to their APIs and communicate what kind of problems can be solved with them. But I'm not sure if I like the redesign of their webpage, I somehow had gotten used to the simplicity of their original one. I'm very curious what their next demonstrations will be... maybe some web crawling based stuff?

See also Paul's post about this is my jam.

Thoughts on Autotagging

I've recently spent a lot of time looking at tags. I'm fascinated by how creative listeners are when it comes to inventing new tags for the music they care about. And I'm fascinated by how small communities adapt these newly invented terms as quickly as they tune into a new radio station. This constantly changing and seemingly endless vocabulary of words to describe music makes me wonder if research on automatically classifying or tagging music will ever be able to catch up.

If you think research is catching up, check out the 22,703 shades of metal, or the 11,929 shades of pop, or the 29,940 shades of rock at Last.fm.



See also Paul's experiments on creating a taxonomy of metal and gothic tags.

See also Mike's recent results on autotagging of music (which includes some impressive numbers).