The Search for Music

SEW: Sun Microsystems is working on some research on music information retrieval, a fast growing area that has some good commercial application in digital music: Sun's technology can make song recommendations by actually analyzing the audio. It's called "Search Inside the Music."
The technology analyses features such as rhythm and beat strength to categorise the music. It then searches for files with similar attributes. The system takes about three seconds to analyse one minute of music...
'Search Inside The Music' is currently a research project, and Sun does not yet have any plans to turn it into a commercial product.
A presentation about this new technology is here...