The NSF today granted The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company that offers enhanced music search, recommendation and interactivity technology to online music companies $500,00 to continue developing its unique data content technology.
Specifically the grant will help Echo Nest develop its "Musical Brain," that applies machine learning techniques to both natural language description and Internet link graphs to model communities in order to predict preference, taste and sentiment for different kinds of media (music, TV, online media, video games, books), the NSF said.
The Musical Brain is a large-scale data mining platform that reads about and listens to all online music content. The idea behind the technology is to integrate people-focused community and sentiment analysis technologies into an autonomous, learning and scale-free media knowledge service for digital entertainment providers and marketers that can change the way digital content is marketed and sold, the NSF stated.
According to the NSF, current contextual information mining approaches that scan the text on a page for advertisement or recommendation ignore valuable community connections inherent in most self-published Internet discussion. Sentiment and opinion extraction systems operating on full text create challenging language parsing problems are fraught with issues of scale and adaptability.
The identification systems can automatically categorize anonymous Internet writers or website visitors into specific demographic communities based on their tastes in many kinds of media.
The company recently announced an agreement with API management firm, The Mashery to make the Musical Brain available to developers and online music services via an ongoing series of web-based APIs. Mashery will manage access to the Echo Nest APIs, providing the necessary infrastructure for credential management, throttling and caching, and reporting. The Echo Nest's first API, "Analyze" is a web-based application that can analyze a music file in a few seconds to render a 'musical score' for computers. The musical score is a small XML file detailing tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and other musical attributes of the uploaded track. Analyze can power music visualization, real-time music games and DJ remix applications with a profound level of music understanding, according to The Echo Nest.
To get a sense of how the Analyze API works, look here.
The company was co-founded by two MIT PhDs, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan. The Echo Nest's investors include a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and a Boston- based private investment fund.
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