AcousticBrainz: a community platform for gathering music information obtained from audio

Abstract

We introduce the AcousticBrainz project, an open platform for gathering music information. At its core, AcousticBrainz is a database of music descriptors computed from audio recordings using a number of state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval algorithms. Users run a supplied feature extractor on audio files and upload the analysis results to the AcousticBrainz server. All submissions include a MusicBrainz identifier allowing them to be linked to various sources of editorial information. The feature extractor is based on the open source Essentia audio analysis library. From the data submitted by the community, we run classifiers aimed at adding musically relevant semantic information. These classifiers can be developed by the community using tools available on the AcousticBrainz website. All data in AcousticBrainz is freely available and can be accessed through the website or API. For AcousticBrainz to be successful we need to have an active community that contributes to and uses this platform, and it is this community that will define the actual uses and applications of its data.