I know that some of you are using Pandora already. For those who don’t know, Pandora is the primary output of the Music Genome Project. The group analyzes music and rates it on various scales (tempo, key, more esoteric stuff). You put in a song you like, and Pandora will search its database for other, similar songs. Which is pretty dang cool if you ask me. One of the cool things about Pandora is that it’s simple. You put in your starting song and Pandora automatically builds a ‘radio station’, which is basically a giant playlist, of related songs. Plug in a song, sit back and listen.
Here’s a similar thing I just found OWL Multimedia. OWL is even more interesting. Take an mp3 on your hard drive, any mp3. Plug it into the Java applet they provide. Select a ten second (or so) snippet of the song that you really like. The applet then does a wave form analysis and runs it through their database comparing it to wave forms from other songs. It then provides a list of songs that utilize high-similarity wave forms.
Basically the system finds other songs that have parts that sound like parts of songs you really like. That is dang cool. I love technology.
Thomas
Oooh. Must play.