Based the influence of:
Zils and Pachet - Musaicing (DAFX 01) (results)
Tristan Jehan - Creating Music by Listening (PhD thesis)
Make a better tool for editing recorded music.
Incorporating more of the musical structure will benefit both novices and experts at making collage and adding samples to works. For example, when "mashing up" existing recordings, one must first establish a tempo grid (source: Boot Camp - Mashing for Beginners). Since many people are working on Machine Listening problems now, we should be able to find a few algorithms good enough to establish a decent tempo grid.
Our overall strategy is to apply the positive results found in machine listening (note segmentation, beat segmentation, timbre similarity, rhythm similarity) in a way that presents a rich but facile interface for making new music out of old music.
We can find additional sources of expertise to apply to our editor. For instance, we can frame our problem of finding a sample out of a huge library as an information visualization problem.
Creating Passionate Users proposes that one way for software to be engaging is to have a number of "levels" which users naturally progress through to achieve greater mastery.
Here are some proposed level tasks for Mused users and developers. They range from Level One: Music Fan to Level Ten: Grand Collage Ninja.
1. Simple Modification - Take an existing music track and speed up the tempo, or change the key.
Sample Addition - Take an existing track, add samples from another song.
Sample Addition-Subtraction - Take an existing track, delete rhythmic or melodic material to leave holes, and add material from other music to replace it.
Harmonic Meddling - Take an existing track, and change the key of a limited part of the song.
Static Tempo Mixtape - Take a string of tracks, and modify them to have the same tempo. Cross-fade between them in the transitions.
Dynamic Tempo Mixtape - Take a string of tracks, and change the tempo smoothly from one track to the next, as well as crossfading between them in the transitions.
Power Hour - Create a beatmatched one hour mix for Jim's Power Hour.
Stylized Mixtape - Make either a Static or Dynamic Tempo Mixtape with elements of Simple Modification, Sample Addition or Subtraction, and Harmonic Meddling in each song. Come up with a creative concept for the mixtape.
Classic Mash (Sample Addition x2) - Take two familiar but stylistically different songs and interlace them.
Cover Song (Sample Addition x5) - Recreate a musical track as in Sample Addition, but draw most of the musical material from at least 10 tracks in equal proportions.
Creative Composition - Make an original composition from 10's of songs, using bits of vocals, rhythms, and instrument lines in new arrangements.
10. Comprehensive Composition - Create a song with a totally novel structure containing samples from 100's of different tracks, each of them lending a recognizible style to the song, but without any full melodies lifted from one particular piece.
This approach affords several benefits. It gives a set of intermediate milestones for development. Once development is finished, it provides a clear path (like a tutorial) for a user to gain mastery in progressively difficult tasks. Also, it makes us all feel like ninjas. Which is good.
Titus suggests Sonic Fountry's ACID which uses audio data pre-labeled with beats.
Tristan's page references Celemony's Melodyne, Bias's Peak, Ableton's Live, and Emagic's Logic Audio.
I've personally used Cakewalk, Audacity, Fruity Loops, and Tracktion One (raw material software). I still must try Fruity Loops Studio (latest), and Tracktion Two.
[ynniv: you should check out Dr. Rex in the Reason suite, as well]
Review Criteria:
1. Automatic Segmentation Processes present - algorithms that find the beat, find the notes, or anything novel in this regard.
2. How the sound is organized into a GUI
3. Any other special features or upshots