Legendary 28-time Grammy winner Quincy Jones has made an undisclosed strategic investment in the “Emotional” Artificial Intelligence company Musimap. In addition to being an investor, he will act as a special adviser to Musimap, utilising his industry standing to foster relationships and help the business grow.
The investment is being made through Jones media and artist management company Quincy Jones Productions. The board of directors also includes the CEO and founder of Silicon Castles and former President of Dolby International, Andreas Spechtler.
Investment fund & startup accelerator LeanSquare is also investing in Musimap as part of its commitment to supporting the music technology sector in Belgium and beyond.
The company has developed a technology that it describes as a “psycho-emotional profiling engine” called MusiMe. The technology builds emotional profiles for listeners, detailing their mood, feelings, and values based on their listening history.
87-year-old record producer Jones was fascinated by Musimap’s technology after it captured his imagination and said, “I’m incredibly impressed by Musimap’s technology and am delighted to be able to help them grow with this investment. I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate my personality profile was when testing MusiMe, and it’s apparent that the product has a tremendous amount of potential.”
Emotional AI
Founded in 2015 by Frederic Notet and Vincent Favrat, Musimap is an Emotional Artificial Intelligence (A.E.I.) company that leverages 20 years of human research, audio-processing, and AI. It claims to own one of the largest manually annotated music databases in the world.
According to the company, its set of APIs utilises the proprietary database in a fraction of a second to provide clients with unique emotional intelligence. Apart from MusiMe, the company has two other technologies: MusiMatch – it leverages AI to match and find musically similar tracks, and MusiMotion – this leverages AI to enrich metadata, tagging tracks with weighted moods, emotions, and musical attributes such as genre, key, and BPM.
Music icon, Jones, has long been regarded as a pioneer in the music technology space, investing in Spotify in its early days, as well as piano-learning software, Playground Sessions, alongside Jammcard.
Jones’ career spans seven decades, with notable achievements including becoming the first African American Vice President of a major record label, as well as producing Michael Jackson’s all-time best-selling album, Thriller.
In 2017 he launched Qwest TV, a service offering high-definition streams of concerts and music documentaries.
Image credit: ShutterStock
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