Mrs DART is the commercial name for the "DART: Distributed Audio Retrieval Using Triana" project. It will produce a "proof of concept" software product that can be used to evaluate potential markets for a user driven music recommendation system.
Current music recommendation systems rely on explicit individual user rating of music linked to track information such as artist, track name, and genre. Music Information Retrieval (MIR) technologies aim to analyse actual music content for "features" but are very computationally expensive and do not scale well to Internet level usage. This project aims to solve both of these problems by combining MIR techniques with Peer to Peer technologies to provide distributed audio processing and retrieval at an Internet scale.
This project brings together several technology projects and both academic and commercial partners. Triana, a scientific workflow and distributed computing environment developed under PPARC funding, forms the basis of the system. The project brings in a commercial partner in the form of Synchro Arts Ltd to explore potential commercial exploitation routes.
If this mini PIPSS initial project proves successful it will pave the way for a full PIPSS proposal and subsequent commercial exploitation.