Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
The Echo Nest Remix API offers a very cool tool that lets you re-create one video using segments of another. Here, Keith Moon’s drum track from “Who Are You” gets re-made by Animal. Dancing by Rita Moreno.
(via Music Machinery)
Another awesome demo of Echo Nest Remix: Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of,” shuffled so that each segment is replaced with one from a different part of the song that sounds like it. This version starts to fall apart towards the end, because there are no repetitions allowed; Paul does an analysis of this error and shows off a few other versions over at his blog.
(via Music Machinery)
Amerie’s “One Thing” featuring Michael Jackson’s vocals (DJ API)
Made by analyzing the vocal track from the original song, and then pulling tiny bits from a collection of MJ acapellas using an algorithm that finds the closest “match.”
(via Music Machinery)
The video above was produced using the Echo Nest Remix API to play every beat in “Boom Boom Pow” backwards. I have to say first, I am a big fan of the results. (And no, not just because I may have an unhealthy obsession with Fergie.) I think that for a demonstration of the Echo Nest’s beat-shuffling capabilities, a song so obsessed with the technological (the cliché technological in particular) and its own beat is a great choice. You can see some other basic manipulations over at Paul Lamere’s blog where he has cataloged a few.
Reviewing the musical results of computational processes like these is tricky business: are you evaluating the work of a computer? a person? just “the work” on its own? In this case, the work is not presented as a “work” per se, but just as a demonstration—look how easy it is to move beats around with relatively few lines of Python code, try making your own artistic productions, and so on. This is the special sneakiness of the demo: it is always “just a demonstration,” apologizing for simplicity with a technological story. “Pow Boom Boom” is not a song, it is an example of a bit of code, so my real aesthetic pleasure at listening to it is not the enjoyment of a song, but rather the enjoyment of a different kind of artifact.
So we have a question of packaging. The “demo” wrapper is armor against aesthetic critique, although I don’t think this computational remix needs it. Other uses of the Echo Nest Remix API so far (like MoreCowbell.dj or DonkDJ) are more aesthetically questionable, to say the least, converting songs from one genre to another computationally or running cowbell and Christopher Walken all over a song. Of course, these examples rely on another type of wrapper, “comedy.” Putting a Sigur Rós song into DonkDJ and turning it into bastardized Northern British lower-middle class dance music is surely a pleasure that would have been unimaginable for the creators of the ARPANET. I am reminded of using early consumer-level speech-to-text software in the 90s and laughing as dog tooth buffalo tomorrow.
While I was writing this post, a new example of the Echo Nest software’s application came out: a really promising set of tracks from the Echo Nest’s own DJ API (a.k.a. Ben Lacker). These tracks, presented as part of an actual DJ set, are more musically complicated than the beat-shuffling demos. By “musically complicated” I mean both that they move more into the territory of “real songs” and that they are more intricately structured remixes. These tracks are in between a demonstration and a full-on “song.” To a certain extent, any of this early work has the protection of “demo” on it (which is why I said “promising” before, rather than “great”), but these pieces are clearly trying to make early statements on what this kind of art can be like. There is promise here, but much of the appeal still lies in the novelty alone (not that I have a problem with novelty for novelty’s sake).
The most exciting piece of the group for me is a remix of Amerie’s “One Thing” in which Amerie’s vocals are replaced by snippets of Michael Jackson’s voice, sampled from a large set of acapella tracks. The Echo Nest Analyze API chewed through the Amerie vocals and used the analysis data to substitute the most similar-sounding bits of MJ, making a totally nonsensical lyrical line that vaguely follows the pitch and timbre of the original. This is like seeing a computer try to speak human language, and it is simultaneously terrifying and awesome. I think aesthetically, it is a great use of the tool (better than the version that retains Amerie’s vocals, replacing the scattering hits and drums that define the song’s aesthetic with samples from a gamelan).
I have some more things to say about what I think “most similar-sounding” means in the context of contemporary recordings and the API, but those will just have to wait for the next post.
