Mark Forscher

HacKey is an interesting little visualization tool. Enter a last.fm username and it visualizes the musical keys of your favorite tracks, providing an overall percentage breakdown of keys. It’s a cool idea but I would love to learn the methodology—the app is pretty fast so it’s clearly not scanning keys in realtime. Does this mean last.fm has already scanned all or some of its users’ tracks? And how exactly is the musical key of the track determined?