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Very Large Scale Music Understanding--Brian Whitman
Pages 43-46

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From page 43...
... How we got from one to the other is less interesting than what it might mean for the future of expression and what I believe machine perception can actually accomplish. In 1999, I moved to New york City to begin graduate studies at Columbia working on a large "digital government" grant parsing decades of military docu ments to extract the meaning of acronyms and domain-specific words.
From page 44...
... In short, we had built a black box that could neatly delineate other black boxes but was of no benefit to the very human world of music. The way out of this feedback loop is to somehow automatically understand reaction and context the same way we do when we actually perceive music.
From page 45...
... , I left the academic world to start a private enterprise, "The Echo Nest." We now have 30 people, a few hundred computers, one and a half million artists, and more than ten million songs. Our biggest challenge has been the very large scale of the data.
From page 46...
... We track artists' "buzz" on the Internet and sell reports to labels and managers. The heart of The Echo Nest remains true to our original idea.


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