Eventide has released a trial version of Mood, a new plug-in that characterizes the emotional content of music, and translates it into MIDI signals.
Mood analyzes music including key, spectral content, tempo, dynamics and additional aspects to create a set of ‘descriptors’ which are then compared to a data base. The data base has been populated by people listening to and rating pop songs.
Mood displays, in real time, the relative intensity of four emotions – angry, calm, happy and sad. The idea is that the intensity of these emotions can be translated to MIDI and OSC values which could be used, for example, to control the brightness and color of lights on stage or in a dance club.
How Mood Works
While a computer algorithm can analyze audio, it cannot, on its own, map the results of the analysis to how the audio will make someone feel. The computer must be trained by humans. Training is done by asking people to listen to examples of songs that make them feel a certain way and having them judge the degree of each emotion. The algorithm then analyzes these rated songs to determine those characteristics involved in eliciting specific emotions. This process creates the ‘descriptors’ that can then be used to analyze a new submission/song.
“Mood is a bit whimsical and no doubt some will question why we bothered to create the plug-in. The fact is that audio analysis is at the heart of what we do and we were curious to explore the possibility of using signal analysis to map musical content to emotion,” said Eventide’s Tony Agnello. “We were also inspired by a well-known producer who, upon learning of the idea, said we were ‘nuts’. Fair enough.”
To date, Mood has only been trained on pop songs. Solo voice, solo instruments, jazz and classical music will not yield meaningful results. Training is ongoing, however and Eventide is hoping that people will download the plug-in and help improve it.
Mood is available for download at no cost for a 90 day trial period. If you try out Mood, let us know what you think of it!
I can’t quite believe that a company like Eventide would create this. It’s like buying a Neve whoopee cushion plug in.
Glad to read that comment above, It is f’ckin comical the rubbish that we see being peddled. These thins are very far removed from being synthesizer related . It really is no big deal to dig out musical genres, who is relying on software like this?
“Who is relying on software like this?”
Obviously no one, which is the point of doing things that experimental and even ‘nuts’.
“Mood is a bit whimsical and no doubt some will question why we bothered to create the plug-in. ”
Yeah really why?
Also, I wish I could describe my moods in only 4 words….
If people ‘get’ a new product immediately, it’s probably not very innovative.
Cool to see them experimenting like this!
link is broken. product can’t be found on the eventide site.
Looks like Synthtopia readers killed another site!
Let’s hear it interpret this emotion: *gurgle*.
yeah i wanna try it out. do some mapping and see what i can manipulate. sadly, that link is not working.
The Eventide site is back online!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUvADbpqGlQ
Cool, but it looks like my computer’s ink cartridge utility: ‘Uh oh, I’m running out of yellow–oops never mind, this song is just low on ‘happy.'”
Ok, I find this plug in absolutely ridiculous. But… the tech behind it could have some great uses elsewhere. The consumer might have a use for this, but certainly not the creator, because if you can’t judge the mood of a work of music on your own there is no way in hell you are going to do anything meaningful with that information should someone give it to you. That being said, imagine how cool it would be to have a truly advanced search system for something like Netflix. “Genre” and “Actor” are very crappy ways to categorize content. Users are actually much more interested in things like length, “mood”, no camera shake, relative brightness, violence level, reflected beliefs, etc. The same could apply to music. There are so many genres and sub genres now that they are all completely irrelevant. Often a user like a smattering of songs from across all genres, and there is a common theme there, but marketers will never find and promote it. If technology existed that I could point at a huge music library and say, “get me things that have a groove, between these certain speeds, no singer unless they are really good, no screechy sounds, and nothing political or about teenage love”, then we would have something truly useful.
THIS PLUG IN IS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!!!!!!! The stupidest thing ever. I freaking love it!!! Forces me into left field. Let’s do more crazy things!!! More creativity please and tell the haters fist fight me about for money I’ll win!!!