Introducing AcousticBrainz

MusicBrainz, the not-for-profit project that maintains an assortment of "open content" music metadata databases, has announced a new effort named AcousticBrainz. AcousticBrainz is designed to be an open, crowd-sourced database cataloging various "audio features" of music, including "low-level spectral information such as tempo, and additional high level descriptors for genres, moods, keys, scales and much more." The data collected is more comprehensive than MusicBrainz's existing AcoustID database, which deals only with acoustic fingerprinting for song recognition. The new project is a partnership with the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and uses that group's free-software toolkit Essentia to perform its acoustic analyses. A follow-up post digs into the AcousticBrainz analysis of the project's initial 650,000-track data set, including examinations of genre, mood, key, and other factors.