New music search engine co-founded by ECE alumnus

Imagine a music search engine uniquely tailored to identify your individual music listening style; a free engine that would allow you to listen to a customized playlist of recommended titles while sharing your song choices with others. Such an engine is now a reality thanks to technology developed by One Llama Media, Inc., a Champaign-based startup company co-founded by May 2007 ECE graduate, Amit Sudharshan.

After users enter the name of an artist or a song title on One Llama's Web site (www.onellama.com), the company’s technology immediately generates a playlist of similar songs and presents it to the user in multiple formats. According to Sudharshan, the site currently produces close to a million recommendations per week, which includes both internal One Llama requests as well as other sites that use One Llama song suggestions.

"We’ve developed two different but correlated technologies," explained Sudharshan. "The technology I helped to develop is a cultural algorithm. It mines the Web for references to music - playlists in particular. It would identify what songs play next to each other on say an iPod or a playlist that someone created on a Web site. That really tells you what songs are similar, based off of what other people are saying."

The second algorithm deals with an artificial ear algorithm. "It takes the module of music and parses that into an abstract language," said Sudharshan. "So it really understands what the song sounds like, and then relates [songs] to each other strictly based on how [they sound]. That technique utilizes advanced acoustical analysis as well as extremely high performance machine-learning algorithms in order to create the kind of music recommendations that we provide."

When combined, the algorithms offer a unique service to users. Sudharshan said that One Llama differs from other similar sites like Last.fm, Pandora, and MyStrands, in that it focuses more on the music search technology that identifies song similarity. Users can listen to free music, and can also receive great recommendations and be able to contribute to the online community by creating a custom "llama" avatar to keep track of their sharable playlists. This allows people to make connections with music, Sudharshan said. "What One Llama has that other sites don’t have is really this ingenious way of creating a playlist that you’re going to love," he said. "You can instantly click on a playlist and listen to the music in music video form, as long as you’re connected to the Internet. You can do that in your browser, as well as on your iPhone." If users do not want to bother with music videos, they also have the option to quickly and easily download free Rhapsody software that permits them to listen to 25 songs a month for free.

Identifying what makes songs similar to one another was one of One Llama's challenges, said Sudharshan. "Song selection depends on the user, the listener. If you are really into music for the sake of music and musical quality, the acoustical algorithm is extremely important and you want to weight that at a higher interval," he said. "If you listen to Top 40 music, or music that is essentially popular, then the cultural algorithms are more likely to give you the kind of answer that you want. One of the things One Llama has been able to effectively do is to develop the ability to learn your tastes - to learn how important song popularity or cultural influence matter to you versus how much the acoustical quality of the music is important to you. The technology is really designed to understand that there are differences in the way people perceive music, and we have to satisfy them all by learning their individual preferences and tastes."

If users like the music, songs are available for purchase through Rhapsody or iTunes. One Llama also provides an iTunes plug-in that links the Web to the listener’s desktop music, thus making it easier to find and purchase songs discovered on One Llama.

Currently serving as the director of product development, Sudharshan manages the development of the interface and algorithms that help to run One Llama. He was with the company from its beginning in May 2006, the end of his junior year at the University, as one of the founders and original employees. He had been working with IllinoisVENTURES as an intern at the time. "IllinoisVENTURES brought together individuals at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications as well as others from around the world who have been working on some of these (music search engine) problems for 20 plus years," said Sudharshan. "We all connected, and decided this would be a great company to do. We decided we had the algorithms, the know-how, and expertise to build a terrific company to provide music for people from all around the world."

Sudharshan said his ECE Illinois education has "significantly" helped to prepare him for his role at One Llama. "All of the professors were very encouraging of my work and very understanding of the time required for that work," he said. "The coursework was extremely intense at Illinois, and it is even more so with a start-up like One Llama. As an Illinois engineer you are expected to work extremely hard, produce excellent results, and do it under intense pressure; these lessons carry over very well for what you face in a start-up environment."