The Echo Nest Lab

Infinite Jukebox

For when your favorite song just isn't long enough

This web app lets you upload a favorite MP3 and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. Infinite Jukebox uses the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats. It plays the song beat by beat, but at every beat there's a chance that it will jump to a different part of song that happens to sound very similar to the current beat. For beat similarity the uses pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and the position of the beat within a bar. There's a nifty visualization that shows all the possible transitions that can occur at any beat. Built at Music Hack Day Boston 2012.

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Boil the Frog

Create seamless genre-transitioning playlists between artists

Boil the Frog lets you create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style to another. It's like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. If you heat up the pot slowly enough, the frog will never notice that he's being made into a stew and jump out of the pot. With a Boil the frog playlist you can do the same, but with music. You can generate a playlist that will take the listener from one style of music to the other, without the listener ever noticing that they are being made into a stew.

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Bangarang Boomerang

Unleash your inner Skrillex

Bangarang Boomerang lets you 'play' the song Bangarang by 'Skrillex'. You can drive the song forward, backwards, make it pause, skip to different spots, and so on, allowing you to interactivly re-arrange and remix the song, creating a new and interesting piece of music. We use the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats and tatums. For each of these beats/tatums we display a colored tiled. If you click on the tile we play that part of the song. The tiles anre colored based on their timbral information. The tile widths are based upon the underlying beat lengths.

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The Bonhamizer

Some songs just need a little bit of Bonzo

This app will take a track and re-render it as if John Bonham of Led Zepplin was the drummer. This app works by cutting songs up into beats and tatums, and aligning the beats to John Bonham Drum patterns.

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Every Noise at Once

Explore a map of the musical genre-space

An algorithmically-generated map of the musical genre-space. Genres and artists are positioned by code and data, adjusted for legibility, but the underlying vectors are less interesting than the juxtapositions and clusters that they produce, so the axes have been deliberately left unlabeled and uncalibrated. You are invited to imagine your own qualities and magnitudes that the geometry might be expressing.

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Roadtrip Mixtape

Create a mixtape of local artists for your roadtrip

Roadtrip Mixtape is an application that you can use to create road trip playlists. Type in the name of your starting and ending points, and the application will create a playlist of music by artists that from the area you are traveling through. Drive through Boston you might hear Aerosmith or Donna Summer. Drive through New Orleans and you might hear Lil Wayne or Dr. John. The application uses the Echo Nest API to get the artist location data for thousands of artists.

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Girl Talk in a Box

Don't just play your music, play with your music

Girl Talk in a Box lets you interact with your favorite song. You can speed it up, slow it down, skip beats, play it backwards, beat by beat. You can make it swing. You can make breaks and drops. You can upload your own song or select a song from the gallery. The Echo Nest analyzer is used to break the song into beats and tatums that are displayed as colored tiles that you can interact with. Built at MIDEM Music Hack Day 2013.

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The MobiusTube

For when your favorite music video isn't long enough

The MobiusTube lets you create a never-ending and ever-changing version of just about any Youtube music video. To get started Pick a video from the gallery, or Add your own video from Youtube. Built at Music Hack Day Denver in July 2013.

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Going Undercover

Infiltrate new music territory by following chains of cover songs between artists

Going Undercover lets you create a playlist of songs that takes you from one artist to another by following cover song chains. Type in the name of a couple of artists, and if we can find connections between them, we will generate a playlist that connects the two artists via cover songs. If you don't like a particular song, you can bypass it by clicking the bypass button. If you like a playlist, you can save it to your set of Rdio playlists.

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Bipolar Radio

Music to affect your mood

Bipolar Radio is your standard Pandora-style artist radio but with a twist. Type in an artist, and you’ll get an endless stream of music by similar artists. When you need to hear a high energy song, just click on the yellow happy face and you’ll instantly hear a high energy song by the currently playing artist. Similarly, if you’d like to chill out, just click on the green face and you’ll instantly hear a low energy song that should help you relax a bit. The hack uses the Echo Nest song data to help find the high and low energy songs. It uses a combination of loudness, energy, danceability, and tempo to sort and filter the songs by an artist into the high and low energy buckets. Build at Music Hack Day San Francisco 2011.

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The 3D Music Maze

Music exploration as a game

The 3D Music Maze is a WebGL app that lets you wander around a Castle Wolfenstein style maze and sample music and enjoy the album art. If you wander through the maze long enough you may encounter an embedded game called 'Save Justin Bieber from the Death Metal'. This app is an experiment in using alternative interfaces for music exploration and discovery. I uses The Echo Nest artist similarity and playlisting APIs to build logical clusters of artists and songs. It uses the 7Digital media (album art and 30 second samples) and three.js for all the 3D goodness.

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Map of Music Styles

Explore the world of music via a map of 1000s of music styles and genres

This web app presents a visualization of over 1000 music styles. You can pan and zoom through the music space just like you can with Google maps. When you see an interesting style of music you can click on it to hear some samples of music of that style. The app uses the Echo Nest API to get terms and then constructs a similar-term graph baseed upon overlapping artists. Built during the Rethink Music Hacker's weekend in 2012.

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MIDEM Music Machine

Creating a beautiful visualization of music

This web app presents a 3D animation of a song. The application uses the Echo Nest analysis to find all of the musical events that are used to drive the animation. The 3D machine is rendered in the browser using Three.js. Built during the MIDEM Muisc Hack Day in 2012.

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Infinite Gangnam Style

Make the song that should never end, never end.

This hack takes the viral hit by Psy and creates a never ending, ever changing version of the song. The app works by taking the audio and analyzing it with The Echo Nest analyzer to break it up into its individual beats. Next, an analysis pass is run on all the beats finding each beat’s nearest similar sounding neighbors that fall within a similarity threshold. Then, the song is played beat-by-beat – but with the added twist that any time we play a particular beat there’s a chance that we will transition instead to one of the beat’s similar sounding neighbors. For a pop song like Gangnam Style there’s lots of repetition so there’s plenty of good transition points. The result is that we can loop through the song forever with the song always morphing. Created at Music Hack Day Reykjavik in 2012.

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In Search of the Click Track

See which bands have a machine controlling the heartbeat of the band

In Search of the Click Track is a web application that lets you look at tempo plots for any song to see which bands have a machine controlling the heartbeat of the band. Type in the name of an artist and/or track and get a click plot of the track. If a machine is setting the beat for the song, the click plot will show only small deviations from the average tempo. A flat line means a machine is setting the beat. A machine score of above 90% probably means a machine is setting the beat. Likewise, long runs of machine-like drumming are indicative of the use of a click track or a machine to set the beat.

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Labyrinth of Genre

Wander through a maze of 1000s of genres

This Web App lets you explore thousands of music genres by wandering through a labyrinth of related genres. You can listen to representative songs for the genres.

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Bohemian Rhapshicord

Turn a popular song into a musical instrument

Bohemian Rhapsichord is a web app that turns the song Bohemian Rhapsody into a musical instrument. It uses TheEcho Nest analyzer to break the song into segments of quasi-stable musical events. It then shows these as an array of colored tiles (where the colors are based on timbre) that you can interact with like a musical instrument. This hack won the MTV O Music Award for 2012. It was build during the Music Hack Day Boston 2011.

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The Music Maze

Wander through a maze of 1000s of artists

The Music Maze lets you explore music by following chains of similar artists. Type in the name of an artist that you like and then wander through the maze by clicking on similar artists. If you are an Rdio subscriber you can listen to full tracks, otherwise, you'll hear 30 second samples.

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ArtistX

Explore Echo Nest song attributes for an artist

The app lets you explore across 11 different song parameters: energy, loudness, danceability, liveness, speechiness, hotttnesss, tempo, duration, key, time signature and mode. You can use the app to find all sorts of interesting things. Want to listen all the stage patter for an artist? Create scatter plot for the artist with liveness and speechiness as the X, Y parameters. The songs in the upper right-hand corner of the plot will be the ones you are looking for

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GenreX

Explore Echo Nest Genres

This app lets you explore the Echo Nest family of genres. You can explore genres by genre similarity, by artist year or by artist hotttnesss.

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What's your Stereotype

Do you listen like a hipster or a Bieber-stalker?

This application will look at your music taste (based on your Facebook likes, or your jams from This is my Jam), and tell you which Internet meme best fits your listening style.

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Six Degrees of Black Sabbath

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon for music

Six Degrees of Black Sabbath is a web app that lets you find connections between artists based on a wide range of artist relations. It is like The Oracle of Bacon for music.

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More Cowbell

Gimme more cowbell!

MoreCowbell.DJ is an application built using The Echo Nest Analyze API. It will add cowbell to any song. Upload a song, add some cowbell and maybe a little Christopher Walken and Make it happen.

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Looking for the Slow Build

Finding songs that gradually build in intensity

Using the Echo Nest analysis data to find songs that slowly build in intensity. Includes a web app called Looking for the Slow Build that you can use to see if your favorite song is a slow builder.

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The Loudness War Analyzed

Why doesn't music sound as good as it used to

Recorded music doesn’t sound as good as it used to. Recordings sound muddy, clipped and lack punch. This is due to the ‘loudness war’ that has been taking place in recording studios. To make a track stand out from the rest of the pack, recording engineers have been turning up the volume on recorded music. Louder tracks grab the listener’s attention, and in this crowded music market, attention is important. And thus the loudness war – engineers must turn up the volume on their tracks lest the track sound wimpy when compared to all of the other loud tracks. This data and visualization filled article explores the loudness war using The Echo Nest analysis data.

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How Music Recommendation Works - and Doesn't Work

In depth article describing music recommendation technology

This article explores technologies like collaborative filtering, automatic content based recommendation, and manual approaches used by Pandora or All Music Guide (Rovi). It shows that no matter what the computational approach ends up being, the source data – how we know about music – is the most important asset in creating a reliable useful music discovery service.

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You make me quantized Miss Lizzy

Using Echo Nest Remix to make drummers better (or worse)

Using Echo Nest Remix to make drummers better (or worse).

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The Swinger

Using Echo Nest Remix to make any song swing

The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect.

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Where's the Pow?

Using Echo Nest Remix to remix video

This article walks through using the Echo Nest remix to create algorithmically remixed versions of the Black Eyed Peas video Boom Boom Pow.