Company description
The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company founded by Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman, who met at the MIT Media Lab while they were both getting their PhDs in music understanding and synthesis research. The company has since grown to a small but insane team of developers, designers, musicians and business people all housed in a cozy office in Davis Square, Somerville, MA, USA. We grow an intelligence platform that automatically reads about and listens to the entire world of music for developers to build search, personalization and interactive music applications.
The Echo Nest team is made up of music intelligence scientists and experienced digital entertainment entrepreneurs. Our advisors include the leadership of Bose, DirecTV and XM Satellite Radio. The Echo Nest is a four-time National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant winner. The company is also funded by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and a great group of angel investors that include three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.
About Our Platform
Our applications are powered by a musical brain built at the Echo Nest along with years of research at UC Berkeley, Columbia and MIT. The musical brain automatically:
- Reads about music, constantly analyzing millions of blog posts, reviews, playlists and discussion forums to understand how the online world describes every artist, album and song.
- Listens to music, with technology actually listens to audio files, extracting musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy, harmonic and timbral structures, to understand every song in similar ways a musician would describe it (e.g. "heavy beat, swing groove, fast tempo, 4/4 time, key of B flat, mezzo piano").
- Learns about music trends, analyzing the entire world of online music behavior — who's talking about which artists this week, what songs are being streamed and downloaded, etc. — to understand the latest trends, buzz and fan opinion.
Team
Tristan Jehan - CTO & Co-Founder
Tristan earned a doctorate in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 2005. His academic work combined machine listening and machine learning technologies in teaching computers how to hear and make music. He first earned an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Rennes in France, later working on music signal parameter extraction at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at U.C. Berkeley. He has worked with leading research and development labs in the U.S. and France as a software and hardware engineer in areas of machine listening and audio analysis. Tristan plays keyboards for Boston-based Brazilian combo Brazilnut and builds software and interactive projects for musicians.
Brian Whitman - CTO & Co-Founder
Brian is recognized as a leading scientist in the area of music and text retrieval and natural language processing. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 in Machine Listening and a masters degree in Computer Science from Columbia University's Natural Language Processing Group. His research links community knowledge of music to its acoustic properties to "learn the meaning of music." Brian is an electronic musician that teaches computers how to do it for themselves.
Jim Lucchese - CEO
Jim is the CEO of The Echo Nest. Jim has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Clients included multi-platinum and independent artists, music publishers, digital entertainment companies and branded entertainment. Prior to GT, Jim held sales and corporate development positions at Hughes, where he managed market development and sales with annual revenues exceeding $20 Million. Jim was also Chief Strategy Officer of Webnoize/DMN, a digital entertainment research and advisory company serving over 500 clients. Jim holds a B.A. from Boston College and a J.D., Magna Cum Laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center. When he’s not at the Nest, Jim plays drums and still represents a few indie artists pro bono for fun. Right now, his favorite clients are Game Rebellion and Kemp Harris.
Jim Lucchese
