Somerville, Mass. - The Echo Nest, a developer of enhanced music search, recommendation and interactivity technology, on Thursday launched Recommend, an API that can be used to offer a music discovery and recommendation tool n ay website, blog, social network or retail site. The API is powered by The Echo Nest's Musical Brain, "an automated machine learning platform with an in-depth understanding of the cultural and acoustic factors that inform music preference."

Somerville, Mass. - The Echo Nest, a "music intelligence" firm founded by two MIT Media Lab PhD's, on Thursday announced the release of the Musical Brain, which they say "automatically listens to music and reads about music everywhere on the Web in real-time." The company's first in a planned series of Web-based APIs, "Analyze," can analyze a music file in a few seconds and provide information on tempo, beats, time signature, timbre, key and other attributes. The Echo Nest said the Musical Brain combines large-scale Web crawling, data mining, language processing and audio analysis, and will be able to predict music trends.