SearchSounds makes use of the MusicSurfer technology developed at the MTG / Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

MusicSurfer is a content management system based on music descriptions computed directly from audio data. These descriptions account for several perceptually and musically meaningful dimensions (eg. timbre, rhythm, tonality, ...).

Normally access to online music is only possible by querying artist or song names (or other types of editorial data such as genre), or by browsing recommendations generated by collaborative filtering.

An obvious drawback of the first approach is that consumers need to know the name of the song or the artist beforehand. The second approach is only suitable when a number of consumers has heard and rated the music. This situation makes it difficult for users to access and discover the vast amount of music composed and performed by unknown artists which is available in an increasing number of sites and which nobody yet rated nor described.

Use of the MusicSurfer technologies allows to overcome the mentioned drawbacks and to find Similar sounds or even to query the database by example.

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