Looks Promising: The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio | Fast Company

via fastcompany.com

Read David Zax's full post on FastCompany

"More cowbell! Everyone from Christopher Walken enthusiasts to major record labels to Columbia University is excited about The Echo Nest. The many uses, frivolous and non-, of Echo Nest's massive 30-million-song dataset.

You music lovers out there probably think we're living in a Golden Age. iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody, music distribution and discovery couldn't get any better, right? With the proliferation of music sites and apps, we must be at some sort of saturation point, after all, the telos of digital music technology.
But spend a bit of time talking to Brian Whitman, cofounder of The Echo Nest, and you realize that we're really in a digital music Stone Age. Sure, we've come a long way, but there's still plenty we can't do--our recommendation engines are limited, as is our ability to sift information automatically from songs (to tell the sex of a singer just from his or her voice, for instance). The Echo Nest, a five-year-old company devoted to aggregating, indexing, using, and sharing vast troves of music data, just announced a collaboration with Columbia University's LabROSA (Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio) on something called the Million Song Dataset, free to use for non-commercial music researchers...."

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