Everything has an “API” these days, but what that means in practice is often not so exciting. You can make little widgets for Facebook, or post recent Twitter messages, or do other simple developer tricks. Echo Nest’s “Musical Brain” API is more far-reaching: it’s an API for music. All music online. The first of a series of developer tools, “Analyze” is designed to describe music the way you hear it, figuring out tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and even musical patterns. More developer tools will follow.

Twelve years in development, the Musical Brain is a bit like a digital music blogger. It’s been crawling the Web while you sleep, reading blog posts, listening to music to extract musically-meaningful attributes, and even predicting music trends. It’s like almost like a robotic, algorithmic Pitchfork. (And I’m serious — it may be April Fools’ Day, but this is real. That’s what the “brain” claims to do, backed by research at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and MIT.)

What does all of this mean? The Musical Brain may not be replacing your friendly local music blog any time soon, but what it can do is infuse some musical intelligence into applications like music visualization. The Matmos album at top used the Analyze algorithm to map the timbral profiles of songs on an upcoming album; that graph was then rendered by an artist in watercolor, translating the digital into traditional paint media.

The Analyze API could also enable everything from Web music apps and mash-ups to live audiovisual performance tools, or even smarter music games. That’s the reason co-creators Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan, both with PhDs from the MIT Media Lab, chose to open up development to a broad audience. I got to speak to Brian a bit about the project.

Any CDM readers who live in Chicago should check this out- it’s a weeklong festival exploring/celebrating sound design, motion graphics, and the overlapping regions occupied by both.

In addition to the week’s worth of discussions and skillsharing classes, there will be two “showcase” nights, Saturday Jan. 19th and Sunday Jan. 20th. For those interested, I will be exhibiting two audiosculptural pieces, Octophonopod and Snowy Day during the event on Saturday. There’s a riduculous amount of talent on both nights, amounting to some of the most fresh and innovative people working in sound and motion graphics today.

[- Michael Una]

Take the modular, patchable sound-making capabilities of Reaktor and (at the other end of the scale) Reason, and combine it with a graphical, zoomable, nodal interface with patch cords showing actual signal, as on the reacTable interactive table interface, and you should get something like Mod271. (Pronounced “mode.”)

The software is in pre-pre-alpha phase, but it’s freely downloadable for Windows users if you’re adventurous, and the developer promises more progress and other operating systems soon.

Features:

• ASIO/MIDI support, VSTi version coming
  
• Everything is full audio-rate, meaning you can mix and match MIDI and DSP
  
• Powerful nodes: “every node can be automated with unlimited control points and automation takes place right in the 3D environment.” … “nodes can influence any amount of other nodes or switched into a singular state.”, with radial and linear modes for the nodes
  
• Interface is 3D hardware-accelerated, and the signals even (optionally) draw at audio rate for realistic previews
  
• sample-accurate envelopes and motion, “meaning you can make an oscillator out of an envelope.”
  
• 25 node types and growing
  
• Make your own nodes with Python

Crazy stuff! It’ll be interesting to see how this one develops. And I hope the Reaktor developers are paying close attention; there’s a lot here that could inspire a future Reaktor version.

Full description, lots of background, and that bleeding-edge super-pre-alpha-at-your-own-risk:

Mod271 @NuDSP

Thanks to Ronnie of rekkerd.org for the tip!

Bridging the gap between music visualizer and game, Masaya Matsurra’s musika brings a unique experience to Apple’s iPod.

Matsurra, best known as the creator of PaRappa the Rapper for the original PlayStation, has long used Apple’s tools as a means of creative expression. He sees the iPod as a natural for interactive music visualization.

“The iPod is a device that revolutionized music and it is now poised to be a progressive gaming platform,” said Masaya Matsuura, President of NanaOn-Sha. “Many years ago Apple’s tools first opened my eyes to the power of music and multimedia, so it’s exciting to release my first game for this device.”

Like Apple’s own Music Quiz, which comes with the iPod, musika uses your own music library as the basis for the game. musika can be a passive experience — just kick back and enjoy the trippy visuals — or a more active one in which you press the iPod’s center button as letters in the song’s title appear. As you score points and advance to higher levels, you are rewarded with additional visual effects.

musika is almost brain-dead simple to play. If it weren’t for the superior eye candy, you’d tire of it very quickly. Let’s face it, despite Matsurra’s enthusiasm, the iPod isn’t much of a gaming platform. But as a quick diversion, it’s perfect. Musika is played with a single button and its use of your own music library is inspired. Just as Snake captured the imagination of an earlier generation of mobile phone users, musika is set to revolutionize mobile gaming.

musika is available for purchase and download from the iTunes Music Store for USD$5. It requires a fifth-generation iPod with iPod software 1.2 or later and won’t work on any other iPod or the iPhone.

Masaya Matsuura (Parappa) Releases musika For iPod [Gamastura]

Click To Play

Max/MSP visionary David Zicarelli is fond of saying that Max/MSP is really about numbers. You might hear music, but it’s number crunching that makes it all happen. Understand how to make the numbers work, and you can make your music and visuals do what you want. (Happily, this does not require a whole lot of math acuity, or I wouldn’t be able to do it. Instinct and imagination seem to be the best hallmark of Max masters.)

Lest you believe numbers can’t really make music, though, there are always bizarre and unusual examples of sources for Max projects. The latest comes to us from reader Stanley Ruiz:

Here is a clip of my audio-visual work presented at the 4th Asia-Europe Art Camp in Helsinki, Finland (June 2006).

I used the Philippines’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP per capita) as source to create sounds and manipulate video. GDP values were converted to MIDI data using a gesture-based sensor interface (the data is being sent as I move my hand). Converted MIDI values are then processed in a custom program written in Max/MSP. I used MIDIsense as sensor interface.

The output is an algorithmically composed music, as well as manipulated video (in this instance the video’s frame rate and contrast were manipulated).

… from Stanley’s blog.

(For more on sensor interfaces and MIDIsense, see our previous story.)

Okay, you can’t quite sing along, but Stanley is working on sonifying the GDP of other countries. Eventually, it should make the differences in affluence come alive in a way they might not on a bar chart. Got some unusual ways of working with numbers for music and motion? Let us know.

Looks can be a powerful agent for changing how we think about sound. Pairing liquid, organic speakers with equally fluid and dynamic visualizations, the launch of Muon last month in Italy made this principle readily apparent. I’m all about lo-fi, cheap gear here on CDM, but if you absolutely must launch luxurious aluminum speakers with spectacular animated visuals at a posh party in an Italian salon, I sure won’t complain. Pass the prosecco, please?

Muon Project Page, documentation videos at chrisoshea.org
See coverage at ze | d | esign, toxi’s project blog, MoCo Loco, elsewhere. (Yeah, CDM’s motto is: cover things last. Was a bit busy with Maker Faire!)
Created by Moving Brands

Details on the installation and how it was done: