Beat Spy

Team

• Phil Popp 
• Aaron McLeran 

Description

Beat Spy is a music system prototype which uses a Twitter interface to control musical parameters based on the popularity of specified Twitter queries. Beat Spy creates beats by slicing user supplied music and using those slices in the music system. 

Anybody in the world can participate in the musical output of the system by using a simple tweet grammar:

     #beatspy <phrase>

     #beatspy track <n>

     #beatspy note <query>

     #beatspy beat <query>

<phrase>                -> Creates a unique seed for the music system based on a hash of the supplied phrase.

track <n>                -> Chooses new source material for beats.

note/beat <query> -> Recent popular of the supplied <query> (in terms of number of tweets with the term) is mapped to musical events

Website

BeatSpy's Website will have the following features:

     Live audio stream of the current performance state

     Upload new source material to be sliced

Here are some sample playlists:

• Wreckommendations for Taylor Swift  (Or, how to end the slumber party early)
• "You are not the wind beneath my wings" (The break-up mixtape)
• "Anything but Heavy Metal" (Wreckommendations for Metallica)
• "Anything but Country" - (Garth Brooks Wreckommendations)
• Bands that will never win the VMA awards - (Wreckommendations for Taylor Swift+ Kanye West)

The Wreckommender works by creating a gigantic graph of artists where each artist is connected to its nearest neighbors (using  Echo Nest artist similarity). When given a an artist, the Wreckommender searchs the graph to find the artists that are furthest way from the seed artist and uses these artists to create a playlist

There's some science behind the anti-recommendation.  The paper "Anything but Heavy Metal" discusses the issues around musical tolerance.  

Paul's Music Wreckommender was inspired by the LibraryThing Unsuggester.

Links

http://wreckommender.com

More info at MusicMachinery.com

Tools, Platforms and APIs Used

The Echo Nest API