Brian Whitman is a lapsed scientist and sound artist currently co-founder/CTO at The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company in Somerville, MA. He teaches computers how to make, listen to, and read about music. He received his doctorate from the Machine Listening group at MIT’s Media Lab in 2005 and his masters in Computer Science from Columbia University’s Natural Language Processing group in 2000. His research links automatically extracted community knowledge of music to its acoustic properties to “learn the meaning of music.” His composition and sound art projects consider the effects of machine interpretation of large amounts of media, such as the first actual “computer music” (as in music for computers) of “Eigenradio.” As the co-founder and CTO of the Echo Nest Corporation, Brian architects an open platform with billions of data points about the world of music: from the listeners to the musicians to the sounds within the songs. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.