AcousticBrainz

AcousticBrainz was a project that aimed to crowdsource acoustic information for all music in the world and to make it available to the public. This acoustic information describes the acoustic characteristics of music and includes low-level spectral information and information for genres, moods, keys, scales and much more. The goal of AcousticBrainz was to provide music technology researchers and open source hackers with a massive database of information about music. We hoped that this database would spur the development of new music technology research and allow music hackers to create new and interesting recommendation engines.

AcousticBrainz was a joint effort between Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the MusicBrainz project. AcousticBrainz was originally envisioned by Xavier Serra, the founder and head of the MTG. At the heart of this project lies the Essentia toolkit from the MTG – this open source toolkit enables the automatic analysis of music. The output from Essentia is collected by the AcousticBrainz project and made available to the public.

In 2022, the decision was made to stop collecting data. For now, the website and its API will continue to be available.

AcousticBrainz organizes the data on a track basis, indexed by the MusicBrainz ID for recordings. If you know the MBID for a recording, you can easily fetch from AcousticBrainz. For details on how to do this, visit our API documentation.

All of the data contained in AcousticBrainz is licensed under the CC0 license (public domain).

You can read more information about AcousticBrainz and some of the existing models that we have created on our blog. We also have a page which describes ideas that we've had for this project: AcousticBrainz/Ideas.