OMRAS Music Software
OMRAS Music Software

Who is OMRAS II for?

Imagine you've just been given a gift subscription to a 2-Million song online music store. You can choose 10,000 songs to download onto your music player, but there's a problem. You have never heard a vast majority of these songs so you're not sure which are the ones you'll like. How can you put together those playlists to impress your friends with your vast musical knowledge?

The problem is similar for the radio DJ looking for new playlists to keep their show on the cutting edge, or the professional violinist doing research into different performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons to find a new twist for an expectant audience, or the record producer trying to find a mathematical formula for number one singles (yes, they really do this).

What is OMRAS II ?

The answer to the above questions and other interesting problems concerning large collections of digital music are exactly what the OMRAS2 project will address. When OMRAS2 is completed, you'll be able to get software that helps you build playlists with songs that you'll love even though you never heard them before; and there will be tools to help the violinist and record producer achieve their goals too. Using tools from OMRAS2, your iPod will have its own intelligent DJ who knows your musical tastes, and record companies will be able to predict the best sounds to use for the next chart topping Number 1. If you study Music at university, you'll probably use OMRAS2 for analysing and comparing music.

OMRAS2 aims to help technology researchers build and investigate the software that is needed to construct these super-tools. But that's not all. It will also help music researchers investigate interesting aspects of music, such as what variations of that riff in Purple Haze did Jimi Hendrix play and how did they differ, and how did different pianists interpret Bach's Goldberg Variations. OMRAS2 will also look deeply at how music and information about music (like CD insert booklets, but more and on-line) will be enjoyed at home, not just downloading, but also searching, recommending, browsing and so on. And it won't be hard to use: OMRAS2 will use interfaces that look and react like familiar music software like Adobe Audition or RealAudio player.



Principal Investigator Industrial Partners Academic Partners
Prof. Michael Casey
Goldsmiths Digital Studios
funding