Herd It

Herd It is a “crowdsourcing” application.  We’re collecting information about music by asking lots of music fans – like you – to contribute a little bit of information.  By adding this information up over the entire Herd, we can start to really understand all the world’s music.  In return for contributing data to Herd It, you get to hear great music and play fun games!

There are lots of other crowdsourcing ideas popping up all over the place.  Some great examples are:

GalaxyZoo.org – help scientists discover and label all the millions and billions of galaxies in the universe.

Waze.com – build maps, traffic reports and turn-by-turn directions for everywhere in the world (iPhone app is only for Israel and US so far).

reCAPTCHA – when web sites ask you to type in words to prove that you are human, you’re also helping transcribe old books.

Herd It is a Facebook application.  Facebook is a great platform for our game since:

1. Music is social  – people like to listen, dance, sing and talk about music together
2. Facebook is a great way to access a large audience so that Herd It can collect lots of data
3. Casual games, quizzes and fun music apps are very popular on Facebook

Over the past year of developing Herd It on FB, we’ve learned a lot about the Facebook platform, how it works and where it strengths and weaknesses are.  As time goes on, I’ll post more info so that you can learn from our experiences and develop your own Facebook application.

If you aren’t on Facebook (where have you been?!) and still want to play Herd It, let us know.  We’re working on a standalone version of the game.

At UC San Diego’s Computer Audition Laboratory, we work on using machines to automatically analyze and understand music.  Ph.D students, undergrads, professors and musicians all collaborate and use signal processing, machine learning, data mining and, now, human computation to discover everything we can about music.

In order for a computer to understand the difference between punk and metal or happy and sad music, the machine needs to learn about how each of these types of music sound.  That means that we – human experts and music fans – need to teach the computers to understand these differences.  Just like a child learns to tell opera from Obie Trice, we teach our computer audition algorithms to learn to recognize all types of music.

Herd It is the way that we collect data to train the machines.  When you play Herd It, apart from listening to great music, playing fun games and connecting with other music fans, you are contributing examples of words that describe music.  We use these tags as examples to train computer audition system so that it can listen to, understand and, ultimately, help us discover and enjoy every song ever recorded.

So, now that you know all about Herd It, go play!

www.herdit.org