Mashery
Contact: Laura Merling
Direct line: 415.309.6191
Email: laura@mashery.com
The Echo Nest
Contact: Elissa Barrett
Direct line: 617.548.8993
Email: elissa@echonest.com
THE ECHO NEST TEAMS UP WITH MASHERY FOR PUBLIC LAUNCH OF "MUSICAL BRAIN" APIs
"Musical Brain" Comes to life with "Analyze", first in a series of The Echo Nest music APIs
www.echonest.com
March 26, 2008
Somerville, MA and San Francisco, CA — The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs, unveiled its "Musical Brain" today in partnership with Mashery. The Musical Brain automatically listens to music and reads about music everywhere on the web in real time, understanding more about online music and fan opinion than any system to date.
The Echo Nest is making 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.
Today's announcement included a featured use of The Echo Nest Analyze API: www.thisismyjam.com, a site where users can create beat-matched, DJ-quality micro-mixes of favorite songs to share on blogs and social networks.
"The result of over a dozen years of combined development, the "Musical Brain" has been unleashed." said The Echo Nest Chairman and CEO, Don Rose. "Over the coming months, we'll be announcing a series of APIs powered by the musical brain to radically improve the state of music search, recommendation and interactivity on the web. Our partnership with Mashery allows us to focus on building an expandable suite of intelligent music applications, while ensuring we have the necessary infrastructure to manage access, provide scalability, and measure API usage."
About The Musical Brain
Based on 12 years of research at Berkeley, Columbia and MIT, the Echo Nest's Musical Brain combines large-scale web crawling, data mining, language processing and audio analysis to:
- Read about music, constantly crawling the web and analyzing the text on millions of web pages (music reviews, artist sites, blog posts) to understand what the entire online world knows about every artist, album and song.
- Listen to music, analyzing all of the music on the web to extract musical attributes such as key, tempo, rhythm, harmonic and timbral structures, understanding every song in the same way a musician would describe it (i.e.,"swing groove, tempo = 100 BPM, 4/4 time, key of B Flat, mezzo piano").
- Predicts music trends, synthesizing online behavior to actually predict new music trends.
About The Echo Nest
The Echo Nest makes connections between people and their music more meaningful through technology. The Echo Nest team is co-founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan. The Echo Nest is a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant winner and is funded by a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and a Boston-based private investment fund.
About Mashery
Mashery is the leading provider of on-demand API management solutions. By providing infrastructure needed to manage, monitor and maintain an API (application programming interface), we enable companies to accelerate their web services channel. The business development executive of the future will rely on APIs to recruit and manage their strategic partnerships. Mashery provides all the ingredients required to get APIs up-and-running quickly, easily and successfully while ensuring scalability. Partners, affiliates and developers have immediate access to data and services. Our customers can focus on their core business and drive greater value from their partnerships. Launched in 2006, Mashery is backed by First Round Capital, Formative Ventures, The Accelerator Group, and many prominent angel investors.