It's hard enough to find relevant content online at times. If you're a music lover, you know the challenges of finding new bands or artists you'll actually like is even worse. Search engines that specialize in music use different approaches, often based on what other people who liked the same music also enjoyed. Music search engine mufin, however, eschews opinions in favor of algorithms.
Mufin's core was developed by a team run by Karlheinz Brandenburg, the “father of the MP3.” When you search for music on mufin (which, appropriately, stands for music finder), it ignores artist, album, genre and everything most humans consider important. Instead, it focuses on 40 different attributes that can be analyzed by a computer. These include percussion, style, speech, sound density, vocals, tempo, sound color, instruments, volume, dynamics and loudness. Therefore, when mufin decides that two songs are similar, it is based only on the SOUND of the music.
A number of reviewers have observed that this can lead to some very strange results. The developers of mufin, however, consider this to be an advantage. They believe it gives you “significantly greater diversity while discovering music than with traditional recommendation techniques.”
According to the walk-through provided on the web site, all one has to do to discover new music with mufin is tell it what you like, and you will get similar tracks you might like as well. You can start with a “seed song,” and mufin will give you an overview of the tracks it finds that are similar. This overview includes cover, song, artist, and album, plus a sound preview for the individual song. And then you select a song which mufin should use to display similar tracks.
There are a plethora of other options, including ones that let you track your search history and share tracks with friends, but this seems sufficient for the moment as far as getting started. So come with me on a musical journey...and we'll see if we end up taking a long, strange trip in a yellow submarine or wish we were back in the USSR.
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