Have you ever walked or run to the beat of a song, or tapped along without even thinking about it?
This morning I was driving on the highway listening to Paranoid by Black Sabbath, cruising around 75 mph, and I noticed the beat of the song lined up perfectly with the lane markings passing by my car.
I started wondering if I could do that intentionally, so I skipped through a bunch of songs trying to match the beat to the lines (I learned pretty quickly that I couldn’t).
Then I wondered if this would work on any highway, and sure enough, there’s actually a standard for the length and spacing of lane markings in the US.
Anyway, I wanted to cheat, so I built this.
You type in a song, and it tells you what speed to drive so the beat lines up with the lane markings.
It uses the Deezer API to get a song’s BPM. If there’s no BPM available, it takes a sample from the audio preview and tries to estimate the BPM using PercivalBpmEstimator. I tried my best to minimize errors, but every once in a while the BPM of a song is still a little off.
The inception effect here is hilarious. Watching this get its own front page while the subtitle lags behind with the previous top posts is weirdly funny.
I spent a few hours trying to get this to work, and I couldn’t get it to produce usable results on anything except the training data, even with very simple drawings.
I noticed in the GitHub that they mention it is only around 60% reliable even on their own training data, but the image shown on the front page feels pretty misleading. I made 10 images that were very similar in complexity to the examples shown, and even after running it around 50 times on each image, not a single one worked correctly. In the rare cases where it produced something, the output was completely wrong.
This seems pretty misleading in its current state and definitely needs more work.
This morning I was driving on the highway listening to Paranoid by Black Sabbath, cruising around 75 mph, and I noticed the beat of the song lined up perfectly with the lane markings passing by my car.
I started wondering if I could do that intentionally, so I skipped through a bunch of songs trying to match the beat to the lines (I learned pretty quickly that I couldn’t).
Then I wondered if this would work on any highway, and sure enough, there’s actually a standard for the length and spacing of lane markings in the US.
Anyway, I wanted to cheat, so I built this.
You type in a song, and it tells you what speed to drive so the beat lines up with the lane markings.
It uses the Deezer API to get a song’s BPM. If there’s no BPM available, it takes a sample from the audio preview and tries to estimate the BPM using PercivalBpmEstimator. I tried my best to minimize errors, but every once in a while the BPM of a song is still a little off.
Enjoy cruising to the beat, everyone!