Have you ever had a song that you love so much that you play it on repeat, over and over again, from beginning to end? Have you ever wished that instead of lasting 3:32 your favorite song would never end?
Well, don't dream anymore, it's now possible. You'll be able to listen to your favorite song without it ever ending! Isn't that beautiful?
This feat is called The Infinite Jukebox and was developed by Paul Lamere on the occasion of MIT's Music Hack Day (a sort of marathon for developing applications around music).
The Infinite Jukebox is a website where you can load a song from your hard drive or browse songs uploaded by users, so you can listen to it endlessly… and when I say endlessly, I mean endlessly and not on repeat! And what's more, the song will be in perpetual evolution around the segments that compose it.
The site relies on The Echo Nest, a music toolkit for developers, which breaks down the song into beats (beats). Each of these beats is then analyzed and matched with other similar beats in the song. These beat pairs are then plugged into each other and when the song lands on these beats, there is a probability that the music will continue on a similar beat somewhere else in the song…
So when you listen to the song, you wander through it forwards and backwards without even noticing any transition... It is then possible to listen to a song indefinitely.
The song is accompanied by a pie chart showing the evolution of the song and the connections between beats, which helps to better understand how the tool works.
There are a few rare glitches between certain connections, but overall the result is quite successful and you will be able to listen to your favorite songs for hours and hours... It's actually really great!
And here are some examples if you don't have an mp3 handy to test with your favorite songs:
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- Carmensita – Devendra Banhart
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- Come Together – The Beatles
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- Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
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- Superstition – StevieWonder
- The Game Has Changed – Daft Punk
PS: If you use Chrome, you will be forced to keep the tab The Infinite Jukebox active for it to work… on the other hand with Firefox, no problem!
Article updated on January 3, 2025 by Byothe
