Staying on the Beat

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Paul has written (and blogged about) a little piece of software that will analyze the tempo deviations of a song to try and determine whether or not the drummer used a click track. A click track is basically a metronome piped through headphones that can help the drummer (and therefore everyone else) stay on beat.

I asked Paul to analyze one of my band’s songs as a control (our drummer uses a click track). It turns out that our drummer is steady on the beat as compared to sloppy Metallica, but not as metronomic as Brittany Spears (that is, her drummer…or her drum machine).

Paul’s program is about 20 lines of Python code so it’s real power is in the Echo Nest remix API. There are actually a lot of things you can do with the Echo Nest Developer API. Stay tuned for a new JavaFX experiment that plugs into some of this power.

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