A short clip from the song "Bleeder" by Zombie Girl, whose genome tags, Garth says, include a feamle vocal, disco and hard rock influences, surreal lyrics, syth riffs, and the use of modal harmonies
What Does Music Sound Like to a Computer?
Humans have many different ways to describe music, but many of the ways we describe music can't be captured by computers. Using a list of 800 descriptive phrases and a database of about 5,000 songs, I am measuring a computer's ability to distinguish samples of music that match a particular description from those that don't. The computer performs this task by measuring the loudness of various frequencies in the audio sample.
By comparing the computer's performance on the different descriptions, I can make claims about the kinds of descriptions that computers can detect in music. This could help song recommendation software give better results and provides an evaluation of cutting-edge techniques in the area of machine listening.
Garth Griffin '09