Wow. Last night, someone showed me a short New Scientist blurb about automatic music classification (my thesis topic), and today it's all over slashdot. If that had happened six months ago, I could have gotten other people contributing code to my thesis. I probably would have had an easier time keeping my motivation up too. Working alone gets old after a few months.
The weirdest part though is seeing other people say some of the things I've been spouting for years, mostly about all the great applications for this. I kept thinking, "Yes! Yes! Yes! Now help me write it!"
I'd been planning to start an open project on music analysis after I finished here. I have to spend the next month writing up my results, but I can't waste all that good publicity, so I created a SourceForge project today, project name "vole". Picking a name was hard until I stopped trying to make it relevant. I also quickly put up some links to music analysis research in case anyone is actually interested.