Media Artist in Residence at Spotify, Kyle McDonald has created a visualization using the Spotify Web API to show when two users click to play the same song simultaneously. Serendipity 2014 A map showing ephemeral connections created by simultaneous listens: every second a few people hit “play” on the same song, at the same time.
Continue reading »Mythbusters: Busted! – Farewell to Kari, Tory and Grant
In a video announcement after last night’s show, Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman announced that Kari Byron, Tory Bellici and Grant Imahara would not be returning to the show next season. Adam & Jamie said that they were ‘going back to their origins’ as the only hosts next season, while Kari tweeted that
Continue reading »Echo Nest API and Remix SDK
I finally went ahead and registered as a developer for TheEchoNest API. It’s easy to do and only takes about a minute after which you can immediately send requests. The query format is pretty straightforward and can be sent as POST or GET (not always allowed as GET though) requests, with response such as the
Continue reading »Please Speak Into the Plant – The Visual Microphone from MIT
An astonishing piece of research from the folks at MIT CSAIL was announced for SIGGRAPH 2014. The paper from Davis et al (Abe Davis and Michael Rubinstein and Neal Wadhwa and Gautham Mysore and Fredo Durand and William T. Freeman), entitled The Visual Microphone – Passive Recovery of Sound From Video, shows how they were
Continue reading »Musical Training Gives you ‘Super Ears’
A new study has concluded that musical training gives listeners better frequency selection abilities, particularly at higher frequencies. The study titled ‘Psychophysical auditory filter estimates reveal sharper cochlear tuning in musicians’ (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 136, EL33 (2014);) suggested that “Increased cochlear tuning (i.e., auditory filter resolution) in musicians would help explain their enhanced pitch
Continue reading »