This
is the video for Boom Boom Pow with the beats reversed – you could call it
Pow Boom Boom. It took less code to generate than it took to embed it into this
blog post:
That
bit of magic was accomplished by developer Paul Lamere, via a subset of the Echo
Nest remix API, a platform by which programmers can access the large
and growing database of song characteristics (and song processing tools),
available from the National Science Foundation-funded music categorization
service Echo Nest.&
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The
Remix API is sort of a Swiss Army knife for weird (and occasionally useful)
remix tricks. What makes it remarkable is that it has the ability to
deconstruct music, identify different elements and then seamlessly re-construct
the song in whatever form a user likes. “Automagically”.
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One
of the cleverest demonstrations of its power is its ability to shrink (or
expand) the length of any song, by identifying and seamlessly repeating loops
within it. This feature is called Earworm–after
“a portion of a song or other music that repeats compulsively within one’s
mind.”
Earworm accomplishes this by first constructing a network graph of the piece:
According to its developers, “Each node in the graph is a beat in the song, and an edge exists between two nodes if the
two beats, and the several beats that follow them, sound similar (close in
timbre and pitch). The graph shows us where we can make seamless transitions
between different parts of the song. Stretching (or shrinking) the song is then
just a matter of minimizing the number of “loop” points to reach a requested
duration.”
The results are nothing short of astonishing: Take, for example, the track “If I
Ever Feel Better” by the band Phoenix. Using earworm, the developers easily
transformed it into a seamless 10 minute rendition they call If I Ever Feel Longer. They also transformed
it into a version that’s one quarter as long as the
original, which is “the shortest path through the song with reasonable
transitions.”
If you prefer classic rock, here’s the hour-long, 55 megabyte extended jam version of the Rolling Stones’ Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.
More Cowbell
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“More Cowbell,” a phrase from a Saturday Night Live skit that has jumped the shark several times over, is given new life by MoreCowbell.dj,
based on the same technology. Here’s the Scissor Sisters’ new track Invisible
Light with more cowbell. (My only regret is that I
didn’t push the “Christopher Walken” slider up even higher.
Sure, any good pair of decks can automatically beat-match for you. But can they
beat-match any three songs in the Echo Nest database, in any order? ThisIsMyJam.com
is a cubicle dance party in sector Q-6 waiting to happen.
Echo Nest’s API is free for any developer who wants to apply for a key. There are
dozens of more examples in the project’s Google Code library. Here’s one
worth trying, straight from the developers:
It’s easy to make your own earworm, even without audio. Install beta pyechonest,
install remix, and cd to the earworm example:
> python earworm.py INXS ‘Need you Tonight’
Wait a moment for the audio and analysis to download, and before you know it, you’ll
have a 10-minute version of ‘Need you Tonight’ by INXS. What you do next is up
to you…
