eear is a smartphone app that analyses incoming audio and provides on-screen real-time musical information about the signal, that can be sent via OSC to a laptop or desktop computer for endless musical manipulation and sound-processing.

Features

eear provides tonal information about the music surrounding the user. It can work in continuous mode, providing chord estimations as the music evolves; or in static mode, listening for a time period selected by the user, delivering a global estimate of what could be considered the musical key of the music.

Furthermore, eear displays basic timbral information, such as the degree of noisiness, loudness and spectral centroid (a measure of where most energy is located) of the sound. This information is sent via OSC so it can be easily be used to interact and control musical developments, lighting designs or image processing applications.

Extension

On of the great things about eear is that is a work-in-progress built on very flexible technology. Addition of new analysis features is extremely easy, and in the near future eear will enable the user to choose among groups of context-dependent features. Among them, onset and beat detection are on top of our list.

Diagrams

(soon)

Technology

eear is built with Essentia, the musical signal analysis library from Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona and JUCE, a class library for building rich cross-platform applications and plugins.

Team

Support

If you have feature requests, ideas or comments about future functionality, let us know. Be sure to check back regularly, since we are actively developing, testing and adding new features to the eear.

eear currently runs on Android devices, iOS support will follow

Acknowledgements

eear was conceived in June 2015 during the Music Hack Day at Sonar +D in Barcelona. It won a #musicbricks Incubation Prize, which has fostered the development of the project.