Orpheus Media Research seeks funding for Clio, music analysis tool

A team of developers located in Old City’s Independents Hall is seeking an initial round of funding for their music composition search engine.
After launching an online pre-alpha beta and graduating from the Wharton Business Development Program late last year, Orpheus Media Research – which is developing Clio, a content-based music search engine – is inviting investors to review its business plan.
The investment would be used to hire developers, protect intellectual property and market and support Clio. The group made the announcement in an e-mail to Technically Philly last week, after it decided that funding was the best next step.
“For a couple weeks there, we had to press pause and figure out what was going to be the most flexible development path,” Founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Greg Wilder said in a telephone interview.

When we spoke to Orpheus Media in September, the team had only recently been assembled to take on Wilder’s long-researched music project. Wilder, who holds a Ph.D in piano performance and composition from the Eastman School of Music, began developing the software as a commercial song writer in Philadelphia.
He saw opportunities for the software impacting many fields in the music industry, like copyright litigation, music discovery and automated composition. Working with business strategist David Frigeri, the team has focused on creating a search engine that can cross many of those fields.
“Instead of fragmenting ourselves and building something for every individual use case, it became clear that we should build a universal music search engine,” Wilder says.
After providing the search engine with musical scores, the engine spits back songs that are compositionally similar. The group calls its search engine “Google for music.”
After launching, Clio would be a buying and selling ecosystem for the commercial media market, connecting composers with labels, ad agencies, films, games and other business-to-business outlets. Inserting a piece of music will cost $0.99 and will then be available in the free search. Commercial groups looking for music could find the right compositions by searching for similar pieces of music.
OMR, which assembled at coworking facility Indy Hall, champions the atmosphere for making crucial connections that lead to this stage in its development. “It’s a story about coworking more than anything,” Wilder says.
“Through relationships, the whole place kind of came together to create this alpha project. Now we’re moving to the next level.”
See the pre-alpha video that Orpheus Media Research has been circulating
[tech]d2A67ePM3uc[/tech]