Herd It is a “crowdsourcing” application. We’re collecting information about music by asking lots of music fans – like you – to contribute a little bit of information. By adding this information up over the entire Herd, we can start to really understand all the world’s music. In return for contributing data to Herd It, you get to hear great music and play fun games!

As a game, Herd It’s purpose is to connect fans, share music and make fun!  But Herd It is also part of a bigger picture that’s making it possible for everyone to find the perfect song for every occasion.

When you play Herd It and tag songs with words, we learn from you how to find songs with similar descriptions.  Google makes it possible to search billions of web pages and, even though you don’t know the exact page or URL you’re looking for, describing what you want with words gives pretty good results.  In the same way, Herd It powers a music discovery engine that makes it possible to use words to describe the music you want, search through millions of songs (over 10 million on iTunes and now add MySpace…) and find the perfect tune!

Stay tuned – Herd It search will soon be entering a private Beta testing release.  In the meantime, there are other cool, interesting and odd ways of finding the music you want though.  Here are just a few that we like:

Search by similarity – “I like this song, give me more like it”.  Examples: pandora.com, iTunes Genius feature.

Search by emotion – “I want a song that is dark and calm”. Examples: musicovery.com, AMG Tapestry

Search by genre - “I like hip-hop, yo!”.  Examples: AllMusic.com, any record store (if you remember what they are)

Search by color - “Gimme pink songs”.  Example: guitarati.com (Herd It’s color minigame will find out if this method makes any sense!)

Search by song/artist name – “I want to hear the new song by Franz Ferdinand”.  Example: iTunes

Search by singing/humming – “Naahh nah nah nanana naahh, nanana naaah, hey Jude”.  Examples: Shazam, MiDoMi

Herd It is part of a project at the UC San Diego Computer Audition Laboratory to teach machines to understand music.

What other music discovery methods do you like / use?

LivePlasma – ed.

Source: Herd It.org

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Innovations, Music, Newcomers, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.