Creating a mood-scanner, Possible? Options

[odyssey]

My foobar2000 just went from Hardcore "Scooter" to gentle "Enya"... And I thought "We live in 2008, it MUST be possible to analyze audio data for it's energy and generally adapt a simple category for it, something like "sad/romantic/happy/energy".

I know this has been discussed several times already, and I'm not looking for a bunch of posts about this being impossible, but positive thoughts about how this could be done! This will never replace the need for genres and maybe BPM etc., but it could be a great addition to existing meta-data.

In a seperate thread we can discuss the user-interface that can handle all this

[knutinh]

http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml

The "music genome project" was based on manual analysis of a large music database. However, I imagine that identifying your songs, then doing a database lookup to such a database is a lot easier and more precise.

For automatic characterization, I tend to agree with what is suggested:
1. BPM analysis
2. "loudness" analysis
3. Perhaps some frequency analysis indicating the number of "harmonic" sources at any time

-k