Monotoning Music with Echo Nest Remix

August 9, 2010 11:57 AM

Monotoning Music with Echo Nest Remix
I got an idea a while back to try and automatically "monotonize" music using the Echo Nest Remix library. This is a presentation and explanation of my initial process and some of the more interesting examples I've produced using the script I wrote. See for example Comfortably Numb as a one-chord song or Suzanne Vega's favorite note.

It's a dead simple process, and if I could think offhand of a way to just make the whole thing available as an Upload Your Own Source Files web service (like the Echo Nest folks themselves did with The Swing Thing for the swing.py script a while back) I totally would, but I'm not sure the smartest way to make that happen.

posted by cortex (9 comments total)

The Comfortably Numb one sounds like something between The Residents and John Oswald. Excellent.
posted by idiopath at 12:14 PM on August 9, 2010

You refer to the results as "at best sort of hypnotic and at worst simple dull and uninvolving" but you forgot to add terribly unnerving. Maybe that's just me. I mean, this project is conceptually interesting and it was probably a lot of work but I can't actually listen to any of the samples all the way through.

So, uh, keep it up?
posted by Monster_Zero at 11:26 AM on August 10, 2010

Is there any way to change it so that the octave goes downwards rather than upwards in Comfortably Numb? I can't help but think that some of the transitions would be a lot smoother in that direction.
posted by Deathalicious at 11:39 AM on August 10, 2010

Weird. In a good way.
posted by Outlawyr at 1:53 PM on August 12, 2010

Weird. In a good way.

An album cover blurb if ever there was one.
posted by cortex at 2:06 PM on August 12, 2010

I enjoy this sort of thing.
posted by bobobox at 7:30 AM on August 15, 2010

josh, very nice stuff! we didn't make the swing thing FYI, someone else did, which we highly encourage. i'd also really encourage submitting your script to the remix example library, it'd help a lot of people make their own in the meantime...
posted by brianwhitman at 4:53 PM on August 15, 2010

Oh! I had for some reason gotten the impression that it was one of the nesters behind the Swing Thing website. I'd be curious how whoever was behind it went about bridging the upload/Analyze/swinger chain, actually, since I'd be happy to do the same thing with the Monotoning thing if it's not a headache for whatever reason.

And yeah, I'll be happy to contribute the script to the example library; I've got a couple other inchoate oddities brewing as well that might make nice proof-of-concept things in the same vein. I need to do some cleanup first though, the current code is sort of a (small) mess since I'm still pretty hacky with both Python and the API.
posted by cortex at 10:07 PM on August 15, 2010

This is nifty. I think "Istanbul" by TMBG turned out the best of any of the ones you posted.
posted by straight at 7:22 AM on September 20, 2011