Since SXSW, they’ve been making strides. Their first partner, music production library APM, was announced today. Filmmakers will be able to find music for their scores much easier, thanks to Clio’s advanced matching system, which takes into account everything from tempo, instrumentation and melody to seemingly intangible elements like “the groove.”

Greg Wilder and Alison Conard (the idea people behind Clio) are meeting with bigwigs of the consumer-facing music discovery products soon, hopefully bringing their technology to the masses, albeit invisibly. If Clio works properly, no one really knows it’s there – listeners just somehow feel that the service they’re using today is a ton better than it was yesterday at figuring out what they actually want to listen to.

I was sent some exclusive demos of the product that have me pretty stoked. The first demo used APM’s music catalog; while it was really cool to hear rock seamlessly morph into bossa nova in just a few short steps, it was mainly a geek-out thing. I’m that guy who makes sure the beginning and endings of songs fade into each other on mixes, so matching internal rhythm to internal rhythm through genre is immensely appealing to me. The software recognizes so much information that you can make almost perfect-transition mixes, in addition to mixes that don’t change moods one single inch.

The second set of demos was even more revealing, as it was a set of clips made by Clio that showed various popular songs being discovered via other pop songs. The set that started with Green Day’s “When I Come Around” wasn’t eye-popping on the surface (how hard is it to match up Blink-182 and Green Day?), but have you ever noticed how closely the guitar tone of “Always” resembles “When I Come Around”? Or of “Short Brown Hair” by Everclear? Then it’s straight into “Favours for Favours” by The Futureheads, which I probably wouldn’t have included in this list, but fits in perfectly, sound-wise and rhythm-wise.

That’s the great thing about Clio: It doesn’t care about demographics. Sure, Blink and Green Day sound similar and are in the same scene. But Futureheads are in a completely different scene, but sound similar. A teenage pop-punker could get turned on to indie rock via this list and connections across time and “scene.”

Other playlists do the same for other genres, but here’s the skinny: Clio works. Once a major player or two representing true independents (Bandcamp? Please please please please?) is funneled into Clio, there’s literally nothing stopping U2 fans from hearing your music if your band sounds like U2. That is a major boon for independent bands and music lovers.

Stay tuned for more info from the Clio guys; it will be big stuff. Clio will change the way people discover music, and you may not even know that it’s doing so.

Clio’s unique “use music to find music” approach can function independently of metadata. Starting with a seed song, Clio analyzes the musical grammar and finds matches that are similar in mood, emotion and sound, creating objective and high quality results.  Metadata can be used to refine or categorize search results as desired. Additionally, the technology can detect duplicates and eliminate any bias that might have been introduced during the metatagging process.

NEW YORK, July 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Orpheus Media Research (OMR), an advanced music research and development company that automates the search, analysis, and discovery of music, announced today that APM Music, North America’s leading production music library and music services company, has chosen Clio™ to enhance the Company’s search engine. Clio is the only pure music-to-music search and discovery platform that uses music to find music, producing higher quality matches, and analyzing and indexing music 5,000-10,000 times faster than existing keyword search technology.

APM Music plays a critical role in finding and selecting the right music for entertainment and media producers, providing its clients throughout North America with access to exclusive tracks of music produced specifically for use in film, television, radio, and new media productions. By using Clio, APM hopes to create additional song metadata that will enhance the ability of its clients to find the most relevant tracks for their projects.  Clio’s automated analysis promises to deliver types of metadata in a matter of hours that would otherwise take months or years to create.

“Clio is a fast and objective music search and discovery tool that we believe can provide great value to our clients,” said Adam Taylor, President, APM Music. “Using a seed song, we expect to be able to offer our clients the opportunity to find results that they might not find by using a metadata-only search. In addition to our metadata searches, with Clio, we’ll use music to find music, and then use our metadata to refine the results.”

Clio’s unique “use music to find music” approach can function independently of metadata. Starting with a seed song, Clio analyzes the musical grammar and finds matches that are similar in mood, emotion and sound, creating objective and high quality results.  Metadata can be used to refine or categorize search results as desired. Additionally, the technology can detect duplicates and eliminate any bias that might have been introduced during the metatagging process.

“Working with an industry leader like APM Music is a testament to the fact that there is a real need in the industry for a next-generation music search and discovery tool,” said Bruce Margetich, Chief Executive Officer, Orpheus Media Research. “With Clio, large production libraries, music services, and online music streaming services benefit from an objective search and discovery platform that dramatically accelerates the indexing of music and provides high quality results at a fraction of the cost.”

Clio’s current pilots include some of the top names in the music industry. Visit www.cliomusic.com to learn more and schedule a demo.

About Orpheus Media Research

Orpheus Media Research is an advanced music research and development company that automates the search, analysis, and discovery of commercial-use music. Clio™ is the only pure music-to-music search and discovery platform that uses music to find music, producing higher quality matches and analyzing music up to 1000x faster than existing keyword search technology. Clio combines deep musical expertise with adaptive technology to deliver highly accurate and relevant matches based on mood and emotion. Created by musicians, Clio is the first platform to look at musical context and grammar to understand/interpret musical mood. By referencing the music directly, matches are more accurate and large catalogs of music can be quickly analyzed with or without metatags. For more information, visit www.cliomusic.com.

About APM Music

APM Music (a joint venture of EMI Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing), the largest and most diverse collection of original music available to entertainment and media producers, provides North American-based production clients with exclusive access to over 330,000 tracks of music produced specifically for use in film, television, radio, and new media productions.  Some of APM’s key clients include CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, ESPN, MLB, PGA, Universal, Discovery, Current TV, MTV, BBDO, Electronic Arts, Oprah Winfrey and thousands of others. Recent APM Music credits include: “Priest”, “Larry Crowne”, “The Hangover Part II”, “Bad Teacher”; “True Blood”, “Glee”, “Gossip Girl”, “Mad Men”, “30 Rock”, “Big Bang Theory”; and “Call of Duty: Call of the Dead”, “Assassin’s Creed 2″ and “Just Dance 3″ video games.

Arguably the smartest of them all, however, is one you probably haven’t heard of before. Clio, which is based out of Philadelphia, is a music startup that uses technology to search tracks and provide music recommendations. Since relaunching earlier this year, it’s been making leaps and bounds — to the point where today it’s announcing a significant deal with one of America’s biggest music libraries, APM. The agreement means that Clio will be powering the search system for APM, a joint venture between EMI and Universal that provides music services for film and television shows like Bridesmaids, 30 Rock and True Blood.

The reason they’re using Clio is simple: it’s an incredibly powerful system. APM president Adam Taylor characterizes it as “a fast and objective music search and discovery tool” — but that doesn’t really do the service justice. Let me explain what I find really interesting about it.

Clio is different because it doesn’t categorize music in the same way as other services. While most music systems categorize tracks by adding metadata and keywords that describe it — somebody tagging it “rock”, or information that says it’s 120 beats per minute — Clio, instead, takes the track itself and pulls it apart. It understands what founder Greg Wilder calls “the grammar of music”; the groove of the drum beat, the level of aggression, the playing style, the riffs and hooks and melodies, and much more. The technology actually listens.

After dissecting a track, it can then compare on a number of different criteria and recommend music that actually sounds like what you want. Linked into APM’s catalog, for example, means that somebody scoring a TV show who wants a track that’s dark and moody but with a driving, throbbing beat, can plug in those requirements and it will recommend a string of tracks that have those elements in common.

In this respect it’s a little like the Music Genome Project, the technology that underpins Pandora — but whereas Pandora relies largely on human interpretation to listen to tracks and rank up to 400 attributes, Clio does it all programmatically and in milliseconds.

“Humans break things into little chunks,” says Wilder, a composer and academic who founded Clio’s parent company Orpheus Media Research, four years ago. “We can hear the whole thing.”

Here’s their promotional video.

And here’s a Soundcloud wave that shows you a sequence of songs that Clio’s matched starting with a single seed track — it really shows how the system picks up elements of the music that aren’t easily definable by keywords or simple metadata.

Clio-Generated Playlist: Adrenaline Chase by OrpheusMedia

So why haven’t you heard of Clio?

The reason is simple: it’s not a consumer product. The company is largely aiming at the professional market, striking behind-the-scenes deals that will help it become the engine for services — rather than the service itself. This is a deliberate and careful strategy: the business is trying to scale up in a way that gives it the best chance of long-term success, by creating an enterprise-level system that outstrips anything else on the market. Given the constant financial trouble that music streaming services seem to be in, that may be a smart move: only last year Om spoke to Pandora’s Tim Westergren about how close they’d been to failing over the years.

But Clio says that being the engine doesn’t mean that it wants to remain in the background forever. They’ve got serious targets — and today’s deal is, they hope, just the beginning.

“We want to provide the backbone to streaming services and recommendation all around the world,” COO Alison Conard told me. “Google has a lofty ambition to organize all the world’s information: we want to index all of the world’s music.”

But what exactly is it that makes certain musical ideas worth repeating over others? Why are some musical hooks and patterns ultimately more successful than others? Are there core musical shapes that attach our to reptilian brain and don’t let go?

Denis Dutton presented a number of interesting related observations during a TED talk in 2010 entitled, “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty.”

The “Book of the Dead” (or “Book of Emerging Into Light”) is a set of ancient Egyptian funerary texts — books of spells designed to guide the recently deceased into the afterlife. In a recent address, noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that DNA essentially serves as a genetic “Book of the Dead” — a tried-and-true manual for survival against parasites and other environmental hazards responsible for shaping us into the adaptive creatures we are today. And I suspect musical ideas (especially the most successful patterns that stand the test of time) share this property.

A page from an Egyptian guide to the afterlife. Lucky for me, illustrations are included...

Given the unprecedented depth of Clio’s musical awareness and the millions of tracks Clio’s now listening to, it’s likely that this treasure-trove of data will help illuminate and uncover the most interesting and essential musical DNA preserved in our musical culture — Clio’s personal guide to music’s potential afterlife.

While not its primary function or purpose, it seems that tracking the evolution of musical ideas (as filtered through culture) may be one of the most powerful and far-reaching applications of this new approach to music analysis.

Wilder, a conservatory trained pianist and composer has been working at the intersection of computers and music for the past decade. While a music professor, he quickly became frustrated with the available tools and software, so with a firm understanding of music language, he decided to build his own. Wilder’s resulting artificially intelligent software pulls apart music, identifying harmonies, melodies and rhythmic grooves much like a food critic might savor a complex meal. Then the software generates similar songs based on those identifiers. To maintain ownership of the technology and focus on developing a viable business, Wilder quit teaching, sold all his earthly possessions and began to bootstrap a company in 2004. In 2007, he filed for patents and now, in 2011 he and co-founder Conard have officially launched Clio, which aims to power music streaming services like Last.FM, Pandora, Rhapsody or MOG.

If you are familiar with Pandora’s Music Genome Project, conceived by Will Glaser and Tim Westergren in late 1999, then you are likely familiar with the concept behind Clio’s technology. To “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level,” The Music Genome Project uses 5 genomes (Pop/Rock, Hip-Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music, and Classical) and 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. A given song is represented by a list of attributes containing approximately 400 “genes,” which correspond to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Then, each song is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song.

And this is where Clio is different and more advanced. According to Wilder, Clio is “an automated version of Pandora’s Music Genome Project” that generates smarter playlists for the music industry to the benefit of lesser known musicians. Clio doesn’t apply typical machine learning to music files. Instead, it has the same sort of perception in it that humans have in our minds. For example, if you hear an orchestral track in a film and it doesn’t have a drum set in it, you’re not paying attention to the rhythm. In the same theory, Clio adapts itself to whatever are the most important elements from a cognitive perspective.

“Let’s say you’re trying to find your favorite Brooklyn-based band on Pandora. We want to take the 5 to 10 million tracks everyone listens to and we want to bring all those independent artists based on quality and content of their music into the same playlist. We want to make it possible for every musician in the world to promote their music on equal footing. Right now certain labels can seed music to Pandora. We want to democratize the playing field,” explains Wilder.

I’m terms of a practical application, iTunes or Google could tap Clio’s technology for its new cloud based music services to give users an awesome ability to create smarter playlists and discover new music. Let’s say you make a playlist that you really like, “the perfect playlist,” if you will. Clio could look at that playlist and figure out what it does musically and give you 20 more playlists that could deliver a similar experience.

Watch this video for a further explanation of how Clio works.

While Wilder wasn’t keen to divulge names, he says Clio, a B2B service, is launching soon with production music libraries right now that serve most of the music you hear online, on TV and in advertising. Clio won’t venture into the B2C space for now. First, it aims to be “the intelligent musical brain behind those services out there.”

So what’s in a name? Clio (pictured in the feature image on top) is the Ancient Greek’s Muse of History and is responsible for inspiring many music pieces.

Listen to a playlist generated by Clio here:

Clio-Generated Playlist: Backyard Blow Out by OrpheusMedia

How many musical data points do dogs hear?

The thing is, Clio’s process is much smarter than that. Instead of mindlessly extracting a slew of spectral and temporal data points for statistical analysis, Clio intelligently adapts its attention to key aspects of the musical language present in the track — just like you and I do.

To best illustrate, let’s take a look at some pure results from Clio’s mood-based matching algorithms. This first match-list begins with a section from a randomly chosen seed track (courtesy APM Production Music) and continues with a list of close mood matches.

Clio-Generated Match-list: ‘Adrenaline Chase’

Listening to this match list, it’s clear Clio has identified and matched the musical elements responsible for the epic, heart-pounding, action-filled feel of the original seed track.

But, what exactly is Clio listening to?

Clio identifies and models numerous musical elements, intelligently adapting itself to focus on the aspects most critical to the mood of the starting seed track. In this case:

In moments like this, statistics won't help you.

Rhythmic Feel: Much more than simple-minded estimations of meter and BPM, Clio hears the frenetic hi-hat and cymbal patterns and strong orchestral accents (‘stabs’) and understands their critical importance to establishing the heart-pounding feel of the seed track. Clio behaves far more intelligently than traditional pattern matching algorithms — Clio searches out similarly aggressive rhythmic motives, ensuring the original mood is present throughout the match list.

Harmonic and Melodic Archetypes: Underneath the intense, pulse-pounding rhythmic features, the presence of strong tonic foundation, thematic use of the minor third (e.g. Match #2: 0:26, Match #3: 0:41), and relentless step-wise ascending modulations (e.g. Match #4: 0:55, Match #5: 1:05) go a long way toward defining the mood of this match-list. Again, Clio reacts like a human listener, discovering similar archetypes that maintain the original mood and feel — beyond the traditional limitations of keywords and generic pattern matching algorithms.

To see just how subtle and detailed Clio’s ability to discern mood is, check out this match-list that begins with an aggressive, rock-based seed track.

Clio-Generated Match-list: ‘Backyard Blow Out’

Even though many of these tracks share musical elements in common with the previous match-list (i.e. frenetic rhythm, strong accents, obsessive use of the minor third, and strong tonic foundation) Clio doesn’t confuse the epic-sounding aggressive mood in the first example with the similar (yet different!) youthful, raw, guitar-based aggressive feel of this seed.

Ultimately, Clio’s close match-lists provide music supervisors options that are consistent in mood while offering possibilities that range across varied styles and sub-genres — pure, content-based music discovery at a level previously reserved for expert musicians and musicologists.

Employees: 4-8

Company description (in 140 characters or less): “Orpheus Media Research is an advanced music research and development company that automates the search, analysis, and discovery of music.”

By Greg Wilder, Founder and CSO

Product Overview

Traditionally, large libraries of music have been very difficult to organize and search. Most music search technologies rely on metadata, or written descriptions of the music, rather than looking at the music itself. This has inherent limitations, as words can never fully describe our experience of what we hear.

Clio is the only pure music-to-music search and discovery platform that uses music to find music, producing higher quality matches and analyzing music at least 5,000-10,000x faster than existing keyword search technology. Clio eclipses traditional search methods, allowing metadata to refine, not define, music search and discovery results.

Clio combines deep musical expertise with adaptive technology to deliver highly accurate and relevant matches based on mood, emotion and texture. As musicians ourselves with extensive experience in composition, theory and cognition, we created Clio to be the first platform to look at musical context and grammar to understand and interpret musical mood, resulting in more accurate matches and the ability to quickly analyze extremely large collections of music.

Founders’ Story

In 2004, while working as a professional music composition/pianist, I realized the limitations of current music-listening technology. I asked, “Why can’t computers hear music the way people can?” Determined to overcome that limitation, I combined my 30+ years of musical expertise with the latest music cognition research to build a series of algorithms that would allow computers to hear music the way humans do—picking up on the nuances and relationships that traditional machine listening cannot recognize. By 2007, it became clear that this technology had wide-ranging implications for the industry at large. I then founded Orpheus Media Research (OMR) to hold the intellectual property and filed for the technology’s first international patent.

Two years of academic guest lectures and healthy discussion followed, as I presented my core technology at Vanderbilt, NYU, and Queens University Belfast (ICMC), among others. In 2010, Alison Conard, professor of Music Theory at Temple University, joined me and we decided to take the technology to market. In 2010, OMR launched pilot projects around the world. By the end of 2010, several major players in the music industry were piloting Myna, OMR’s first generation technology, including large music production libraries and online music streamers.

In early 2011, OMR launched Clio, the only pure music-to-music search and discovery platform designed to overcome the ongoing time, cost and quality challenges presented by the need for metadata in music search.  Building on OMR’s original Myna platform, Clio provides additional flexibility to music professionals—including popular online music streamers, production music libraries, music distributors, music publishers, and music tracking/reporting services.

Today, Clio is currently in pilot with 10 major organizations—including one of the top two online music-streaming services, production music libraries, and music publishers. Now we have our eyes on the future, imagining a world where Clio is everywhere music is, helping listeners to build the playlists they’ve always dreamed of building, but could never describe adequately through word-based search technology.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Orpheus Media Research teamed up with a boutique technology marketing firm to launch Clio—focusing on educating both the music industry and music consumers everywhere about the differences between metadata-based search technology and content-based (or music-to-music) search technology. Find us at www.cliomusic.com, on Facebook, Twitter, or on YouTube. We also regularly attend industry events including MIDEM, SXSW, SFMusicTech, and others. Use the email form at ClioMusic.com to set up a meeting with us.

How OMR differentiates itself from the competition

Clio is the only software in the world that can analyze and decode the universal patterns that define musical identity and mood.

Far more advanced than cataloging simple metrics like beats-per-minute and key, Clio understands the flow of musical ideas, recognizes subtle differences between drum grooves, and identifies the unique performance styles of individual musicians. It finds and prioritizes the parts of the music that we, as listeners, find most important.

Unlike other machine learning or social recommendation-based solutions, Clio’s technology intuits the difference between Lady Gaga and Ravi Shankar and can find music that sounds (and feels!) like either one.

The search results, playlists, and recommendations Clio generates are so good because they’re likely the ones that you would generate if you had the prodigious memory of a computer.

Business Model

OMR operates on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model.

OMR’s current needs

Orpheus Media Research is looking for hands-on technical leadership with a specialized skillset to assist with the design and implementation of optimized search algorithms over large data sets and supported delivery of proprietary APIs and other cloud-based services to a wide variety of B2B clients. The ideal candidate will have a strong theoretical background in math, algorithmic optimization, refactoring, and machine learning. Musical theory and/or cognition expertise is welcome, but not necessary.

OMR/Clio Music – www.cliomusic.com

This is a different approach to the Music Genome Project, which relies on human experts to evaluate each track. The company just launched a new website and announced that it’s service is being piloted by ten major organizations.