Product Demonstration: FASTLab’s SndsLike Music Search Engine FLI Logo


What is SndsLike?

The FASTLab SndsLike software suite allows a content owner (an on-line music subscription service or a production music provider, for example) to create a database and then match songs based on their musical similarity. The SndsLike system provides similar functionality to song search engines (playlist generators) such as Pandora™ or MusicGenius™—without the need to have listeners generate the song metadata manually, or to collect millions of user playlists. In contrast with other music search engines, SndsLike can be used with non-mainstream music collections, and importing new tracks into an existing data set is fast. All the search metadata is derived from software analysis of the actual musical content.

The examples below show the results of 14 searches against a small (14000 tracks) data set of mainstream music.  The "sounds like" search key songs for these examples are punk, folk, classical, new age, etc. The SndsLike Player Demo GUI shows a table of songs with the search key at the top and the "similar" songs sorted by distance. The top 20 matches for the 14 example searches are shown in the screen dumps below.

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SndsLike GUI example

SndsLike Demo App with search results for a punk song by Green Day.
Results are more Green Day and  assorted punk
SndsLike GUI example

SndsLike Demo App with search results for a Vivaldi chamber orchestra.
Results are chamber music by Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for a soft folk song by James Taylor.
Results are more JT, S. Stills, Don McClean, Paul Simon
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for a different song by James Taylor.
Results are the Joni Mitchell, Elvis, Jewel, J. Armatrading
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for new-age chanting.
Results are Deva Premal, Enya, Yanni, Hornsby
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for latin guitar and flute
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for relaxing solo piano
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for solo 'cello sonatas
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for comedy & spoken-word
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for up-beat Joni Mitchell
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for electric blues
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for classical symphony concerto
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for Metallica
SndsLike GUI example

Search results for techno/rap

These examples illustrate the power of the content-derived metadata for song similarity searches. If other metadata sources (such as text tags or labels) are available, the “sounds-like” search can be filtered based on these tags. There are many options for tuning or refining content-metadata-only searches.

It is also possible to bundle the analysis and statistical processing modules with the search engine run-time, so that users can up-load songs that are not in the data set (e.g., this week’s top hit) and use them as search keys within a given data set.

Using SndsLike with a customer data set entails the analysis stage and the search run-time, both of which scale well to large data sets or heavy user demand.  The SndsLike software modules can delivered either as a link-able C++ API or as a web service, enabling large and dynamic data sets to be searched on the desktop or in the cloud.

Contact

Stephen Travis Pope, FASTLab
E: stp - at - FASTLabInc.com
W: http://FASTLabInc.com
T: (+1-805) 895-6252