In Search of the Music DNA

Boston.com: In a downtown office building an hour’s drive north of Silicon Valley, the technology revolution beats on.
Young musicians, their headphones plugged into desktop computers, are analyzing thousands of songs — from popular artists to garage bands — by more than 400 musical measures. In an adjoining room lined with rock posters and shelves crammed with compact discs, T-shirted engineers are shooting pool while employees on their lunch break jam in an acoustic rock session.
Welcome to Savage Beast Technologies Inc., a five-year-old software start-up that is busy building a ”music genome” to identify the world’s recorded music according to vocal, lyrical, melodic, harmonic, and instrumental attributes. The results are fed into a massive database to spit out recommendations for music-loving shoppers at Best Buy, Borders, AOL, and other retailers that license Savage Beast technology.
Start-up composes a ‘music genome’ [Boston.com]