Change the oil, pack the car and cue up the playlist, because it’s time to head down to Austin for Music Christmas South by Southwest. I’ll be down there Tuesday night all the way to the end in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Here’s an audio and video approximation of how excited I am.

You can expect loads of SXSW coverage here at the OKSee blog. I’ll be spending Tuesday, Wednesday and the first half of Thursday covering the Oklahoma Film and Music Office’s The Buffalo Lounge. The fantastic people up at OF&MO have put together a lineup of 28 Oklahoma bands that I’m really excited to see. Expect photos, audio clips (of talking — music clips from my teeny recorder would sound like this), interviews, reviews, news bits, the whole nine yards. It’s gonna be a blast.

I’ll also be tweeting up a storm at twitter.com/okgazette.

From 6 p.m. Thursday onward, I’ll be kicking it all over Austin, trying to catch the best and brightest new music the smorgasbord has to offer. I have several priorities (one of Braids’ 9 shows, Typhoon, Matt and Kim, Rocky Business, Givers), but I’ll be all over the place, reporting it as I hit it. I may even drink coffee to get me through this. My stimulant of choice is Red Bull, but at 10:30 a.m. Friday when I’m trying to get to a Chris Bathgate show at 11, I may have to call in the big guns.

Here’s a whole bunch of SXSW info for those going/lusting:
• Official site
• Last.FM band aid, which will run your Last.FM account against the listings to tell you who you should see, which will make attendees drool and lusters weep
• Guardian complete band listing, with vids, streams, bios and more on each
• Bandcamp visualizer – about a fourth of the bands have music downloadable/streaming/available for purchase here
• Free iTunes playlist

Thanks to Pitchfork for alerting me to a couple of these links.

photo Braids

While I was in Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest, I was able to talk with Greg Wilder and Alison Conard of Orpheus Media Research. They are touting a service with an April launch called Clio that they feel will revolutionize music listening (its predecessor, Myna, is live now). It’s a computer program that listens to music and categorizes it by its qualities. Doesn’t sound that cool? Wait for it.

Ever heard of the Music Genome Project?

It’s the thing that powers Pandora: dozens and dozens of people sitting around, listening to music, and categorizing it by approximately 400 unique qualities. Each song in MGP can take up to 20 minutes to be organized. Because of this laborious process, Pandora has only about 800,000 tunes in its catalog.

Clio automates the process.
 
“The analysis time that the computer takes to actually listen to a piece of music is around one to two seconds,” said Wilder, founder and chief science officer.

A three-to-five minute pop track takes literally the length of a snap to process. This means it categorizes tens of millions of tracks at a time.

Repeat: tens of millions of tracks at a time.

Um, wow.

What does this mean? Well, they want to partner with existing services and use Clio to power everything. And by everything, I mean any way that people find music: iTunes Genius, Rhapsody, Amazon, MOG, Pandora and Last.fm are all entities who could benefit from this.

The company is already working in television and movie music, as the screen often demands a song with a very specific mood. If the music director of a production company has a track with the right mood in mind, he or she can plug it into Clio, which will match it to other songs that sound like it in the Vanacore music library, a current partner of Clio. The program then produces a playlist of tracks that sound similar and are available for use.

But Clio’s library isn’t going to only hold production music, or even major-label music. Clio was started by two indie musicians, and they want to help out independent artists. They have plans to partner with companies like ReverbNation and Bandcamp to make large quantities of indie music accessible to Clio, too. That means when the music director puts in one tune he likes — say, a number from post-rock instrumental act Maserati — it will spit out an entire suggested soundtrack — perhaps something by Explosions in the Sky, something by The Non (pictured).  

“That will help independent artists stand right next to established artists based on the quality of their music,” Wilder said.

People who haven’t played a single show could be queued up over U2, as long as their contribution sounds more like the chosen starting song than “Where the Streets Have No Name.” When Clio powers your listening portal of choice, you’ll easily be able to find new things you actually want to hear.

With the processing power that Clio has (remember: tens of millions of songs at a time), it is not an overstatement when the founders compare their endeavor to a musical Google. Clio has the ability to categorize almost every piece of music ever written and make it streamable to you.

Again, wow.

Streaming music may never be the same.

___

While you’re here, grab these MP3s:

“Lower Away (Unplugged)” — Sunshine Factory. Surprisingly mellow and graceful piano piece.
“Big Sick” — Big Pauper. I guess you don’t need guitars for druggy psych anymore.
“How Does It Feel to Be in Love?” — The Bynars. Probably something like this power-pop gleefest.

Ever since I met the founders of Clio at South by Southwest, I’ve been eagerly anticipating their product’s impact on the music scene. Their idea automates and expands the Pandora music-matching process, making music discovery both more agile and more far-reaching. Their goal is every piece of music ever written, at your fingertips. I am so behind this idea.

Since SXSW, they’ve been making strides. Their first partner, music production library APM, was announced today. Filmmakers will be able to find music for their scores much easier, thanks to Clio’s advanced matching system, which takes into account everything from tempo, instrumentation and melody to seemingly intangible elements like “the groove.”

Greg Wilder and Alison Conard (the idea people behind Clio) are meeting with bigwigs of the consumer-facing music discovery products soon, hopefully bringing their technology to the masses, albeit invisibly. If Clio works properly, no one really knows it’s there – listeners just somehow feel that the service they’re using today is a ton better than it was yesterday at figuring out what they actually want to listen to.

I was sent some exclusive demos of the product that have me pretty stoked. The first demo used APM’s music catalog; while it was really cool to hear rock seamlessly morph into bossa nova in just a few short steps, it was mainly a geek-out thing. I’m that guy who makes sure the beginning and endings of songs fade into each other on mixes, so matching internal rhythm to internal rhythm through genre is immensely appealing to me. The software recognizes so much information that you can make almost perfect-transition mixes, in addition to mixes that don’t change moods one single inch.

The second set of demos was even more revealing, as it was a set of clips made by Clio that showed various popular songs being discovered via other pop songs. The set that started with Green Day’s “When I Come Around” wasn’t eye-popping on the surface (how hard is it to match up Blink-182 and Green Day?), but have you ever noticed how closely the guitar tone of “Always” resembles “When I Come Around”? Or of “Short Brown Hair” by Everclear? Then it’s straight into “Favours for Favours” by The Futureheads, which I probably wouldn’t have included in this list, but fits in perfectly, sound-wise and rhythm-wise.

That’s the great thing about Clio: It doesn’t care about demographics. Sure, Blink and Green Day sound similar and are in the same scene. But Futureheads are in a completely different scene, but sound similar. A teenage pop-punker could get turned on to indie rock via this list and connections across time and “scene.”

Other playlists do the same for other genres, but here’s the skinny: Clio works. Once a major player or two representing true independents (Bandcamp? Please please please please?) is funneled into Clio, there’s literally nothing stopping U2 fans from hearing your music if your band sounds like U2. That is a major boon for independent bands and music lovers.

Stay tuned for more info from the Clio guys; it will be big stuff. Clio will change the way people discover music, and you may not even know that it’s doing so.

The local arts and entertainment-supporting initiative Buffalo Lounge will graze around Oklahoma City this week, for two separate events. 

The Lounge, which debuted at this year’s South by Southwest and has appeared at Norman Music Festival, deadCENTER Film Festival and the Tulsa International Film Festival, will be on site at tomorrow’s grand opening of Whole Foods Market at 6001 N. Western and at Saturday’s grand reopening of Myriad Gardens. A bevy of local musicians are scheduled to play all day long at both events. Each lineup is listed below.

Check out more information about the Buffalo Lounge at oklahomafilm.org, or the Lounge’s Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Whole Foods Market
• Ryan Lawson, 8 a.m.
• Daniel Walcher, 10 a.m.
• Matt Stansberry, 12 p.m.
• Ben Kilgore, 2 p.m.
• Sherree Chamberlain, 4 p.m.
• Camille Harp, 6 p.m.

Myriad Gardens
• Sugar Free Allstars, 11 a.m.
• Steelwind, 12 p.m.
• Susan Herndon, 1 p.m.
• Defining Times, 2 p.m.
• Mark Gibson Band, 3 p.m.
• The Wurly Birds, 4 p.m.
• Green Corn Revival, 5 p.m.

Congratulations are in order for a handful of local bands named to the official South by Southwest festival schedule this week! They are:

• Jacob Abello
• The Boom Bang
• Defining Times
• Junebug Spade
• The Non (guitarist Zach Zeller pictured)
• Horse Thief

Looking forward to seeing and hearing you guys represent the north side of the Red River well! Feel free to check out the rest of the bands listed at the SXSW site.

Former OKSee skipper Stephen Carradini and I will in Austin, Texas, next month (next month, you guys!), possibly with regular Gazette contributor Joshua Boydston, whose press credentials we’re waiting to receive. We’ll be crawling all over town to bring you recaps and photos from these and other bands’ sets, so be sure to check back with OKSee and follow us on Twitter, too.

Tulsa bluegrass-folk-indie duo Desi and Cody swung by the FOX 23 studio in Tulsa last week for an appearance on Great Day Green Country. The song’s called “Fable,” and it’s a nice showcase of Desirae Roses’ singing ability.

Also, please excuse the morning show host’s mispronunciation of Bruce Springsteen’s last name. Check Desi and Cody out at South by Southwest at Friends Bar (208 E. Sixth) at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, or at The Side Bar (602 E. Seventh) at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

For a more comprehensive guide to Okie performances at SXSW 2012, hit up our listing.