The Echotron

Having read Paul's post yesterday, I instantly applied for a beta invite. In fact, while writing this blog post I'm listening to a very pleasant stream of music from the echotron. I'm impressed! It couldn't be much easier to get started. It's very easy to quickly add a bunch of artists I like to my profile, and I even get to listen to any search results. The recommendations are pretty good, definitely a lot better than many others I've seen out there... and they are sometimes rather different from the ones I get at Last.fm (in a good way). However, despite being biased, I'd still argue that Last.fm's recommendations are better ;-)

Anyway, it seems the echotron could easily turn into more than just a site built to showcase the echo nest's APIs.

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.

Web Services for Researchers

It just occurred to me how soon every research lab might be offering a long list of web services. Bandwidth is not a limiting factor. Building a web service is not that hard as it was 5 years ago. It's a great way to share without giving away code (and IP). It's also user friendlier as it doesn't require installing someone else's most likely buggy code on your own system. And it's potentially a great way to make money, too!

I wonder if I'm the last one to realize this? :-)

Anyway, what has helped me realize this was Thomas Lidy's announcement of his teams new web service, and The Echo Nest's web services that I recently found out about through Paul. Both allow you to upload music, extract features from the audio signal, and send them back to you.

I just gave both a try and they worked very smoothly. The two pictures below show results for the same track. The first one is created with the processing music visualization tool provided by The Echno Nest, the second one using Matlab to analyze the fluctuation pattern that Tom's tool extracts.





I wonder if the Echo Nest's service would crunch 100k tracks. (I believe there are at least a few research groups already dealing with collections beyond 100k tracks.) The service Tom announced is limited to 100 tracks/day and a maximum of 300 total per voucher (which requires you to sign up with your email address). Anyway it's a great start. And it seems that Tom will soon be making more announcements on further services that allow anyone to visually organize their music collections using a metaphor of geographic maps. Nice!

Btw, the Last.fm web services also seem to be very popular amongst researchers, at least some have been hitting them very hard ;-)

And one of the most eagerly anticipated web services is probably the MIREX DIY web service which was announced at ISMIR 2007 by Stephen Downie's team. The service will allow researchers to upload their implementations and receive evaluation results in return. Which will make it very easy for researchers to test if they are heading in the right direction.

Fun with Audio Analysis

Paul just blogged about it: The Echo Nest are demonstrating some of the stuff they have been working on. The one I like best is "automatic song" (which they say is a composition from automatically combining about 50 songs).

I'm curious what impact their API to extract features from audio will have on MIR research. Seems like they are also targeting artists who use processing to visualize music content. I'd like to see videos of their music visualizations.

Guessing Games

nest @ The Echo Nest is a blog by the Echo Nest guys. There's a post mentioning artist identification results for 2005. With numbers showing that a system named "Cepco" outperforms MFCCs.

I asked Google (maybe I didn't ask correctly) but Google doesn't seem to be aware of any publications mentioning a Cepco system (sounds like CEPstral COefficients, doesn't it?). In 2005 Mandel & Ellis submitted a nice approach to artist identification using MFCCs and SVMs. I'm guessing that at about the same time the Echo Nest found a similar or maybe nicer solution to artist ID?

They also have a post on the world of music criticism. The numbers could be anything (e.g. term frequencies?) but I guess it does mean that Brian and his team have continued research on automatic record reviews?

My favorite is this interesting post. What's so different in the two figures? Anyone have a guess? :-)

If it's a visualization of features extracted from audio then here are some guesses I'd make: Maybe everything (input, algorithms) was the same for both but one of the audio signals was slightly shifted in time? Or maybe they used some rescaling (e.g. loudness compression) techniques on one of them and not on the other? Or maybe one is a cover version of the other?

Echo Nest Expansion

The Echo Nest announced that they won:

"the Young Entrepreneur Initiative (YEi), a nation-wide contest organized by the French embassy in the US, which aims to help create or develop most innovative companies in France."

Seems like they are successfully expanding to Europe! I'm very curious what Brian Whitman and his team will come up with.