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Using Computers for Sophisticated Music Analysis 97

Posted by Soulskill from the will-it-tell-you-how-bad-you-are-at-guitar-hero? dept.
Tom Avril writes "Need an accompaniment for your melody? Seeking a virtual dancer to try out your new choreography? Or perhaps you're making a new TV commercial, and you need a snippet of music that sounds something like Radiohead, but a bit more mellow. Increasingly, sophisticated software can help with these sorts of tasks. We got a look at the latest from the nascent field of Music Information Retrieval, after its conference in Philadelphia: 'A key part of the conference each year is the announcement of results from a sort of software shoot-out — a competition in which various universities pit their music-analysis algorithms against one another. Entrants from more than a dozen countries competed in 18 tasks, using their computers to "listen" to selections of music, then identify such things as the genre, mood, composer or title. The eventual goal: to help people search for music they might like by combing through millions of audio files in a database. ... In another task, the computer had to identify tunes that someone hummed. "The idea is, you go into the karaoke bar and start humming, and the computer retrieves your song," Downie said.'"

Feed MacBook Pros updated: Santa Rosa, LED backlighting, and 1920x1200 display (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Laptops

Right on cue, we've got MacBook Pro updates for you to love or hate depending upon your fanboy affiliation. First the 17-inch which now features new NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics and a new 1920 x 1200 pixel display (for $100 extra)... at last. Both the 15- and 17-inch models now sport Intel's Santa Rosa platform -- Intel's latest take on Centrino featuring an 800MHz front side bus which changes dynamically to save power. Apple was also kind enough to finally loose a MacBook Pro with LED backlighting just like Sir Steve promised. However, that appears to be limited to the 15-inch model. So now we're looking at a 15.4-inch MBP with a 1440 x 900 pixel display topping out with a new 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 160GB 5,400rpm disk, 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (up to 4GB supported), pre-enabled 802.11n of course, a new 256MB of NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics option, 8x (up from 6x) slot-loading SuperDrive, and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR. It maintains the same dimensions while tipping the scales at 5.4-pounds (down from 5.6-pounds). The 17-inch meanwhile tops out with the same 2.4GHz proc and up to 250GB of disk. Much newness, at least for the 15-incher, for the same entrance fee of $1,999 starting today -- it'll only get you into the cheap seats but the faithful have to sit somewhere.

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