After Morning A Be To Got There's

A practical application of the EchoNest Remix API.

version 1.0
 

The Echo Nest Remix API is the "Internet Synthesizer that lets you make things with music and video." It works by uploading your song to a server, getting back a bunch of analysis data about the song, and allowing a Python program to use that data to guide the cutting, slicing, speeding up, slowing down, pitch-shifting, etc. of the song. A key feature identifies the boundaries of all the measures, beats, and "segments" in the song (actually the nearest zero-crossing to each, which is nice to splice).

Their reverse.py example takes either the beats or segments and reassembles them in reverse order.

In South Park season 3, episode 3, a succubus kept Chef under a spell by singing "There's got to be a morning after" to him every night. The boys learned that the only way to break the spell and expose the succubus was to sing the song in reverse order.

A snip of Stan and Kyle singing their backwards song..

I used reverse.py to reverse "The Morning After", by Maureen McGovern, in four combinations of two options:

The second option needs explaining. reverse.py takes the splices and puts them together, each in forward audio, but with the slices in the opposite order. The results below have forward-English words in reverse order. The optional additional step was to take the whole resulting audio file and reverse it. The result is something that more or less follows the melody, but where each word or sylable or measure is backwards. These files have backwards-spelled words in forward order below.

After_Morning_A_Be_To_Got_Theres_beats.mp3 (545K)
After_Morning_A_Be_To_Got_Theres_segs.mp3 (554K)
Makefile (1K)
audio_new.py (60K) version of EchoNest audio.py fixed for big-endian machines
reverse.py (2K) by Robert Ochshorn and Joshua Lifton
serehT_toG_oT_eB_A_gninroM_retfA_beats.mp3 (545K)
serehT_toG_oT_eB_A_gninroM_retfA_segs.mp3 (554K)

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