Music Retrieval Demo

This is a small demonstration of some audio retrieval-by-similarity work I have recently been pursuing. The aim is to automatically find audio clips that sound "similar," in some sense, to an example clip. Here's a brief explanation of how the demo works, and some reasons why this use of other people's music doesn't constitute copyright infringement.

Below is a scrollable list of more than 250 sound clips, which are 7-second excerpts from longer musical recordings. Representative genres include jazz, pop, rock, rap, and techno, as well as Brazilian music, plainsong, solo piano, guitar, and "easy listening." Click "Play" to play the selected clip or "Search" to find music that sounds similar to your selection. The number to the left is a similarity score; the larger the number the closer the match. Clicking "reset" then "Search" will give you an alphabetical listing of available artists/tracks.

This work is still preliminary, which hopefully excuses the occasional bizarre result. But even if you think Gregorian chant sounds nothing like Nat King Cole, do listen with an open ear: the similarities are often surprising.

Some things to search for:

Piano music · Grunge rock · Acoustic guitar · Reggae · Jazz · Medieval plainsong

Comments and feedback to Jonathan Foote.
This demonstration uses an open-source software package called TreeQ. The TreeQ code is available at Sourceforge.
Also, take a look at a similar audio retrieval application, done by Muscle Fish LLC, that inspired this page.