http://users.last.fm/~matt/hackey/

HacKey is a tool that seems to have been built by a last.fm employee that looks for patterns in your favorite songs. That’s fancytalk for saying it finds the key that you seem to like the most.

Its an interesting tool. I’m assuming that last.fm has popular songs on their server that they can use for this kind of tool, which is interesting in itself. I tried my profile, and due to my obscure and foreign taste in music, I got no results. It got to a certain song and just froze up. However, I put in a friend’s profile and actually managed to see what this thing can do (which is what the screenshot is above).

They’re using the Raphael Library to animate the pie chart, and then I’m not sure how they’re analyzing the song key, but it looks like thats Javascript too. As it reaches the end of the library, the background color darkens to black, at which point its done. It tells you what key you like the most, and the prominence of major or minor in that key, which is interesting.

Programming music analysis tools is something I’ve never done, so this is really intriguing for me. I didn’t really know this kind of stuff was possible. But, the more you know!

(this post is very late, I know)