Achievement

IGERT fellow Luke Barrington has designed, developed and released Herd It, a "game with a purpose" that is launched as an application on Facebook. Herd It connects Facebook users in real time as they all listen to the same piece of music and uses fun and competitive games to collect their opinions about the music they hear. This data is used to train a machine learning system that can "listen" to new music and automatically describe it with relevant words. The resulting computer audition system can understand music and is used to build a semantic search engine - "Google for music". The development of Herd It and the music search engine involved machine learning, as applied to audio perception as well as significant analysis of human interaction and learning to devise a game that was both fun to play and met the data collection goals.