Music machine to predict tomorrow's hits
Computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a computer program which they claim can accurately forecast where a song will appear in the charts.
The Echo Nest software has been developed by Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan, who believe it will fundamentally change the way people choose the music they listen to.
It is difficult to get computers to understand the differences between different styles of music and how they are appreciated by the public. Modern music analysis software can only tell that two songs are similar from the (often subjective) details on music genre or tempo typed in by the person who created the music or the MP3 in the first place. The problem lies in how music is defined.
To get round this, Dr Whitman decided that computers should do all the work of cataloguing songs.
