Recently, Michael Mandel updated the
MajorMinor
site (an ESP-style game for collecting social tags for music), to allow
one to browse the tags generated by humans as well as to examine the
tags generated by their autotagging algorithms. The machine tags are
trained on the human tags to 'automatically find relevant clips based on
their sounds'. They have about 50 or so tags trained, including tags
like 80s, instrumental, indie metal, strings, slow fast, repetitive,
sample and rap.
Some of the machine tags are really good:
jazz,
drum and bass and
female.
while some are not so good:
violin,
punk and
keyboard.
It's great that Michael is making this data available for everyone to
see and explore. We have some similar data from our autotagger. Doug
has put together a nifty web for exploring this data - hopefully in the
next couple of months we can do the same as Michael and make it
available for all to use and explore. Doug keeps threatening to start a
blog, so perhaps he'll write about it sometime in the near future.
The Machine tags for "British" are also pretty fun to look through.
Posted by Zac on May 19, 2008 at 11:37 AM EDT #