

Mapping Your Music Collection - rbanffy
http://www.christianpeccei.com/musicmap/?utm_content=buffer723e7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

======
ecdavis
This is a really interesting article. A problem I've discussed on HN before is
the "dynamic playlist."[0] Creating a music map like this provides a complete
and elegant solution to this problem. Choose starting and ending tiles on the
map, find any path between those tiles and you have your playlist. I might try
my hand at implementing this soon.

In the past I had focused on using listener-generated data from sites like
Last.fm, but if it turns out that musical similarity can be accurately
determined using statistical methods that makes the whole thing much, much
simpler.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7630167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7630167)

~~~
krick
I haven't really looked in it yet, but it seems that "statistical features"
here are mostly about replay-gain, which makes wholes thing much less
interesting and isn't "complete solution" whatsoever.

------
aeontech
google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.chr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.christianpeccei.com/musicmap/)

~~~
mtone
Web archive link, with pictures:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130220094600/http://www.christi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130220094600/http://www.christianpeccei.com/musicmap/)

~~~
aeontech
Thank you, that's much better... didn't think to check there.

------
gbog
I was exploring this area recently, in a more specific way: I'd like to try to
implement a DJ bot. But I am not sure machine learning is the best way: I
would need to have a very big set of mix playlists by professional DJ to train
a machine against. But then, if it worked, it would simply ape DJs. What I
want to do is different: a "bot-flavored" playlist generator. A DJ that pushes
tracks one after the other in an interesting way, but not in a human way. For
instance, my bot-jockey could rightly decide to play a classical music track
just after some deep house, because some features are matching. And this could
be actually a good choice that a human DJ would not have done.

By the way, in the article, they avoid using external data, but for my
project, I am trying to use AcousticBrainz data, and also explored Echonest's.
Not sure where it will bring me though.

------
pperusse
While an interesting technique and premises, there are yet some oddities. Such
as Beethoven in the middle of Rock songs
([http://i.imgur.com/HgwuREl.png](http://i.imgur.com/HgwuREl.png)), I guess
there are others.

I wonder how this would compare with Apple Genius, which I never used.

------
touristtam
that reminds me of this project: MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music
collections
([http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/](http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/))

there is a commercial product for unique ID provided by
[http://the.echonest.com/](http://the.echonest.com/)

~~~
jamessb
It also reminded me of Elias Pampalk's _Islands of Music_ project:
[http://www.ofai.at/~elias.pampalk/music/](http://www.ofai.at/~elias.pampalk/music/)

~~~
touristtam
Nice find. I remember seeing that. I just was amazed by the MusicBox. :)

------
ipince
I get an "over quota" error :(

~~~
rbanffy
It's back on line now

~~~
nerdy
And back offline now!

~~~
rbanffy
It seems to be running on Google App Engine. Its probably hitting the daily
budget.

~~~
joemaller1
note to self: never, ever run anything on Google App Engine.

~~~
rbanffy
It's more like "set your budgets accordingly". I run a couple sites there and
only once I hit one quota limit for a site I did not set a budget and that
exceeded the free tier bandwidth limit. I like it specially for students
because it encourages good practices.

------
ekimekim
Any chance on releasing the code as a single script, so I don't need to copy-
paste the snippets you posted and fill in the blanks myself?

------
curiously
So much cool things you can do with numpy and machine learning on python, this
article makes me determined to play with it.

however, I don't know where to start. I'm not particularly good at math,
calculus or statistics. to me, machine learning and numpy still sounds like
stuff scientists are qualified to use, people with phds. regardless I'm amazed
at the stuff like this article and inclined to venture in to it.

~~~
tucaz
Shoot me an email if you find a starting point. Amazed as you are and in the
same spot regarding lack of skills.

~~~
mutagen
I just dived into some of Udacity's data science classes and it's very easy to
get started with numpy. I'm just scratching the surface but it still feels
amazingly powerful. Pandas is another great tool that goes hand in hand with
data, its like Excel inside your Python REPL with SQL tools and more.

Online class is one way to start, another would be picking a dataset and a
goal for it and diving in. Kaggle.com has a number of content projects and a
great deal of past data science stuff that's open sourced, I've been browsing
it for ideas and approaches. Another source of inspiration might be local open
data initiatives, your city, county, or state might have a pile of data
available for interesting projects.

I think half the battle, at least for me, is not deep statistics or other
maths skills, it is just diving in and trying stuff.

