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Sun Microsystems & Magnatune Partner to Search Inside the Music
Guest Blogger: Teresa Malango, Magnatune (teresa@magnatune.com)
Last year Paul Lamere a Principal Investigator at Sun Microsystems Research and Development, contacted us about using Magnatune music and artwork for a special music search project they were working on. It was all very much on the QT at the time, but in June "Search Inside the Music" was unveiled.
I was invited to Sun’s recent open house and saw the Search
Inside the Music demo first-hand. It’s
an amazing search engine filled with exciting tools that are quite robust and
useful. The user interface is uniquely dimensional
and dynamic, with playlist scatterplots and flying cover art. On the practical side users easily discover, sort,
and program the music.
Paul and his team completely succeeded in putting the fun into working with a large music collection. Its like playing a video game and organizing all your albums at the same time. They are really onto something!
More about Sun Microsystems Search Inside the Music project
http://research.sun.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=153
artwork from Pizzle http://www.magnatune.com/artists/pizzle
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eHome Upgrade Interviews John Buckman
John was interviewed this week by Alexander Grundner, Editor
and Publisher of online news resource and community forum eHome Upgrade. The publication is an excellent site for industry
buzz about the latest technology developments and products.
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Posted by Teresa Malango 7/19/2006
Posted by John Buckman on July 19, 2006 at 11:22 AM | Permalink
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Comments
First, thanks for the neat blog and the neat company.
Second, the URL you give for Paul Lamere is busticated. It's not hard for the web savvy to find the page you meant but you might want to fix it.
Third: so, you say you aren't evil. Ok, well, this project at Sun *is*, at least to the extent it isn't just a waste. The perceptual parameters of musical similarity are pretty well understood by musicians, no? Timbre, melody, harmonic structure, lyrics, rythm, song structure, etc. But that's technical, not musical. They say:
Every song is really a series of acoustic features and characteristics that can be measured, analyzed, tracked, and compared,” he said. “So the first thing we do is generate metadata directly from the audio content.” A few of the features that can be extracted and analyzed include pitch, harmony, key, timbre, instrumentation, tempo, rhythm patterns, and intensity or energy level.
That's an awfully funny use of the word "really". "Every song is really....". So, for example, Richie Havens performance of Freedom or Hendrix's National Anthem at Woodstock? It's all about a series of acoustic features. At least according to the lunatics at Sun.
That's Muzak(tm) theory. Using automation to select (and in the inevitable end-game, generate) signals to pump through brains to achieve a commercial effect. This work is entirely towards a simulacrum of music, not music. It's about the usurption, not the understanding, of musical technique. It's brain and culture piracy, "kindly" automated for us with computational resources sufficient to beat Kasparov at chess.
-t
Posted by: Thomas Lord at Jul 21, 2006 12:13:13 AM
Sorry to follow up on my own message but, just .... AAAHHHH.... I want to scream. From the "search inside the music" site at sun....among the many highly ridiculous and offensive comments.... just to select perhaps the most obvious ...
Mr. Lamere also points out that music search capabilities could fundamentally change the music experience itself. [....] "[...] I can picture classical music buffs listening to three different conductors’ interpretations of the Jupiter Symphony and then debating which is best.”
Yeah, stuff like that never happens. What planet is that guy from, anyway?
-t
Posted by: Thomas Lord at Jul 21, 2006 12:34:09 AM
