By Ricky C. – Product Specialist
Wouldn’t it be interesting to have your car stereo play music based on the content of the song? Categorizing simple to browse playlists, such as beat, chord progression, genre, instruments, mood, and song structure, allowing a quick selection of music that perfectly suits your mood.
Sony’s SensMe feature at first glance on their Sony XAV-60 seemed to be something worth checking out, and after its successful launch, we get a better breakdown of how the SensMe works and is generated – through Sony’s 12 Tone Analysis Technology. They have now incorporated this feature on plenty of their new receivers, such as the Sony CDX-GT650UI or their Sony DSX-S200X.
This feature recognizes music with highly advanced systems that compile a large amount of statistical data, and associate it with metadata. What does this do for us? It allows the user to search for a song based on plenty of different categories, such as searching for songs that have different tempo’s, ability to create slideshows based on the mood of the music, searching through tailored playlists to perceived speed, energy and other factors such as genre and mood.
The 12 tone analysis starts by analyzing the song based on factors such as time, and tone – equivalent to the do-re-mi scale. After its initial analysis, it will create a two-dimensional analysis and it will become easier for the radio to extract necessary information for further processing and categorizing. After obtaining the two-dimensional analysis, it will then analyze based on music theory, such as beat elements.
There has been previous attempts at this technology, and instead of integrating all of these into one, they were acting separately and did not allow accurate results. Resulting songs would not always be similar when sorting through the playlists; this was because the metadata distance does not always reflect similarities in music that we hear. Human perception is the target audience, and Sony did a great job appealing towards this. Convenience is a factor when on-the-go and Sony’s technology continues to develop and help us with easy ways to enjoy great music.
