The Echo Nest and its “Musical Brain” developer website was introduced at DEMOfall 08 today. This so-called Musical Brain is really an open API platform for developing rich new musical experiences. There are more than 30 tool sets available for developers on their DeveloperNest. Here are the three primary API platforms:
- Recommend: Powers recommendations for users by understanding songs, reviews and articles from a target music site.
- Analyze: Generates an XML musical score for uploaded songs analyzing details such as beats, time signature, song sections, timbre and other attributes.
- Feed: Aggregates information about every musical artist on your website including all audio, video, reviews, blog posts and more.
A Piece of their mind
The Application Showcase shares several examples of what can be created with the Echo Nest. There are some silly fun apps such as More Cowbell which allows you to upload a song and actually adjust the amount of cowbell you want to hear for that particular song (based on the famous Saturday Night Live sketch). You can then share the results with anyone.
Here are some others:
- The MyXdup app seems to have broader appeal. It uses the Echo Nest’s API to create an app that can combine two separate YouTube music videos and create a new one.
Business
- The Echo Chamber is a personalized radio station application for imeem’s members. It analyzes your listening history to make suggestions for new music to hear.
- Recomme is a Twitter bot with musical memory. Send tweets to @Recomme and it’ll reply with links to music resources on the Web based on your request. If you follow @Recomme then you can send private direct messages to the smart bot that will reply with the information you want.
Conclusion
The tools from Echo Nest will definitely help create entirely new experiences for music fans online. Making the process easier and less expensive than traditional methods, we can expect a great deal more original Web apps that will enhance our music listening experience. I guess one could say this is a no-brainer?
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