Clio Introduction
Posted on April 18, 2011 by Alison Conard

Music: we know it when we hear it, we know what we like, and we remember it more easily than we do other things (ABC’s, anyone?).

But this guy is really trying.

You may be saying, “Nice work, Captain Obvious,” but when we ask why and start investigating, we find that the answer is incredibly complex and has to do with the way our brains recognize, process, and remember musical patterns.

Even the simplest children’s song contains thousands upon thousands of definable patterns, and only a small percentage of these have any cognitive relevance to us as listeners.

Research in music cognition is beginning to provide some insight into how our brains interact with music; however, there are still more questions than answers. If we don’t even know how our own brains understand music, how can we possibly train a computer how to understand it?

Before telling a computer what to listen for, the programmer has to understand both how humans listen, and what we’re listening for. Until we have a better grip on the processes happening inside our brains, by far the best-equipped person to train a computer to understand music is a highly-trained musician.

Musicians who undergo traditional conservatory training are constantly working with and manipulating musical patterns in a conscious, detailed way. Consider the three sub-disciplines that the traditionally-trained musician studies:

Score

  1. Performance – realizing the musical score so that others can hear and parse musical patterns
  2. Composition – crafting and arranging patterns from raw musical materials
  3. Theory – understanding how music patterns work together to create musical works

Couple that sort of intensive musical training with a natural proclivity toward algorithmic thinking, and voilà! Meet Clio.

Stay in touch with us as we launch this game-changing technology and explore how true music-to-music search will change the way we discover music.