More music magic

Last May I wrote about Pandora, software that "learns" what music you like and streams it to your desktop. Human musician-analysts from the Music Genome Project listen to songs and hand-code them for attributes. In Sunday's News-Gazette, there was an article about One Llama, an in-development music discovery service that uses "artificial ear" technology to analyze music and categorize it. So -- computers rather than people. One Llama extracts 3,000 features from each song to measure similarity, as opposed to Pandora's 200 to 400 attributes. The differences are interesting: human judgment (also human error) vs. automation and a much larger database of tunes. I was excited to see that one of the One Llama team members is Amit Sudharshan, Uni High class of 2002.

A beta version of One Llama will be out later this month and you can sign up on the website to be notified when it's available. Even if you choose not to sign up, be sure to go to the website and take a few minutes to watch the little llama on the lower right hand corner go through its paces. Totally charming.