Here’s a couple of remix videos I did earlier in the year using The Echo Nest API.

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while, but finally decided to get off my ass and put them up since the folks at Echo Nest were kind enough to send me a T-shirt :

(source video one) (source video two)

(source video one) (source video two)

It’s pretty straightforward to create these.

  • Create an account over at The Echo Nest and grab an API key.
  • Download a couple of videos off of Youtube (or elsewhere)
  • Grab the vafromb.py example script that comes bundled with the Echo Nest developer sources.
  • Add a couple of lines near the top of the script (before the from echonest imports) with your API key :
from pyechonest import config
config.ECHO_NEST_API_KEY="<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>"
  • Run the script on your input files :
> python vafromb.py <inputfilenameA> <inputfilenameB> <outputfilename> <Mix> [env]

The Mix parameter is a number between 0 and 1 that determines the relative mix of the resynthesized song and the original input A. i.e. a mix value of 0.9 yields an output that is mostly the resynthesized version.

A Mix of zero will contain only the original song, whereas a Mix of 1 will contain %100 resynthesized sound.

The ’env’ flag applies the volume envelopes of the segments of A to those from B.

This flag is optional, and is kind of hard to explain if you don’t know what an envelope is - try it out and you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.

The hardest part is finding two videos that will mix well together - I’ve found that using one with a fairly sparse, strong rhythm track for inputfilenameA works quite well, with a more melodic track in inputfilenameB.

These examples barely scrape the surface of what you can do with The Echo Nest API - I highly recommend playing around with it yourself if you’re interested in music and computers.