Two MIT Media Lab researchers, Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, had developed an advanced music analysis API as the first part of their Echo Nest software suite. The software is arguably the best of it's kind but the developers needed a visually compelling demonstration to gather interest from third party commercial startups. One of Brian's colleagues (and my professor), Golan Levin, knew I was interested in music visualization and put us in touch. I wrote the following piece for the Echo Nest Analysis API to highlight it's capabilities for beat detection, chroma (pitch) analysis, and timbre analysis: