“Free Music Archive” (Used 22 times)

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that the Free Music Archive is one of 78 not-for-profit organizations across America to receive an NEA Arts in Media grant. The FMA is recommended for a $75,000 grant to support the Re:Mix Media project.

Re:Mix Media is a series of three programs planned by the Free Music Archive to engage audiences in the appreciation, discussion, and creation of music and arts in the digital environment. Three programs will use the FMA's interactive platform to create multimedia art and provide access to those art works: 

1. Re:imagine is a series of themed multimedia contests and workshops to encourage hands-on engagement through the creation of new works inspired by Creative Commons and the public domain.
   
   
2. Tracks to Sync is a monthly mix of music curated with the online video producer in mind. The blog series encourages healthy collaboration between media producers and artists through access to alternatively licensed music and educational resources.
   
   
3. State of The Arts is a monthly program that intersects radio, blogs and live discussion to address applications of creativity involving music in the contemporary digital setting.

The FMA is an interactive music library that by its very nature encourages collaboration. The Re:Mix Media Project will help us take these interactions to the next level through programming that harnesses the potential of the digital era. We are honored to receive the NEA's recommendation in the Arts in Media category, and look forward to working with you to Re:Mix Media!

For a complete listing of projects recommended for Arts in Media grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov. Here's NEA's official announcement as well as our own press release if you'd like to help spread the word. And while we prepare to celebrate our third birthday, here's an "Anniversary Song."

One of the 50+ projects to spring from this weekend's Music Hack Day, Free Music Archive Radio is essentially the template for a Creative Commons Pandora. Enter the name of any artist, and FMA Radio taps into the Echo Nest's musical brain to generate a similar playlist from the FMA's curated library of 40,000+ legal mp3s. Tweak your station further with Mood and Style parameters, and/or Creative Commons license filters.

Despite the fact that it's just a demo (works best on Chrome, not so well on Firefox) FMA Radio has already been written up in evolver.fm, the Dutch blog Muziek & de bibliotheek, and Germany's Progolog. Its awesomeness is enhanced by the fact that it's html5 (plays nice with iPhone/iPad), it's open source, and it was built over the course of 24-hours (whoa!). I spent much of the weekend hanging out with FMA Radio's creators Jeremy Sawruk, Robby Grodin (ConductiveIO) and Julie Vera, the Music Hack Day veterans whose previous projects include Sawruk's Feedtunes (turns Twitter trends into playlists based on song lyrics) and Grodin's Toscanini gestural interface. In addition to releasing open source code, Sawruk and Grodin are Creative Commons musicians, and they've really done an incredible service to the community via FMA Radio.

Music Hack Day is a series of music/tech gatherings fueled in large part by APIs. After the big news last month that FMA's API had been revamped and mapped to the Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone leading up to WFMU's Radiovision Festival, this weekend introduced the FMA to the mother of all music hacking events. It was fantastic to take part -- some highlights after the jump:

Following up on last week's announcement that The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, Mike Adler put together an open source hack to demonstrate one of the myriad possibilities when this most incredible music intelligence platform is applied to the finest collection of free music.

The demo lets you search for any artist in the universe that Echo Nest knows about, and returns similar results from within the Free Music Archive's catalog in an HTML5 audio player. Go ahead and try it out. This is an incredibly powerful music discovery tool, though it's just the start of what we can build together. Sign up for API keys at the FMA and The Echo Nest to begin tinkering with our demo hack.

Next week, we're holding a Hack Day as part of WFMU's Radiovision Festival: Sunday October 30th we will "Re-invent Radio" with The Echo Nest, the Free Music Archive, and Zeega's new HTML5 platform for digital storytellers. There'll be workshops on Musical Timelines, Hacking Physical Spaces, and Multimedia Mash-ups, so plenty of opportunity to participate in the hands-on making of stuff whether or not you've got the proverbial coder's neckbeard. The Radiovision Festival takes place atop WFMU's annual Record Fair at NYC's Metropolitan Pavilion (125 W. 18th St), and Hack Day is free with RecFair admission as long as you reserve a spot in advance.

The Echo Nest has indexed the Free Music Archive catalog, integrating the most incredible music intelligence platform with the finest collection of free music.

The Echo Nest has been called "the most important music company on Earth" for good reason: 12 years of research at UC Berkeley, Columbia and MIT factored into the development of their "musical brain." The platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis and machine learning to automatically understand how the online world describes every artist, extract musical attributes like tempo and time signature, learn about music trends (see: "hotttnesss"), and a whole lot more. Echo Nest then shares all of this data through a free and open API. [read more here]

FMA's library of 40,000 free & legal music files have now been analyzed by the Echo Nest and made easily accessible to the developer community through a common Artist, Track, and Album ID system. Licensing information is included as part of the API, and so developers working in the Creative Commons sphere now have an incredible pool of curated audio to draw from for their noncommercial music applications.

Combining The Echo Nest's music intelligence tools with the FMA's curated approach opens up exciting possibilities for interactive music applications and new music discovery. For example, the Echo Nest's sandbox documentation describes how to query for artists who share music via the FMA and are similar to Radiohead

>> Read More About FMA + Echo Nest for more information about how to access this wonderful resource

The Echo Nest presents as part of WFMU's RadioVision Festival NYC, as part of the October 30th "Reinventing Radio" Hack Day along with the FMA and Zeega, an open-source html5 platform for digital storytellers -- RSVP here

The FMA now hosts over 40,000 high-quality, curated mp3s. That's eight times as many songs as we launched with in April 2009, and it would take well over 100 days to listen to all of them. There really is more than something for everyone, and many of the projects we are currently working on as well as the Oct 30th Hack Day @ RadioVision Festival will help connect site visitors with the types of sounds they seek from within the FMA's vast, rapidly-growing library.

A few of the recent library additions that propelled us over this numerical milestone are attached to this post.

Cheers to the next 40,000!