A new technology could let your computer recommend new music you might like based on an acoustic analysis of the tunes it already knows you enjoy.

By analyzing the characteristics of a song — like timbre, rhythm, tempo and chord changes — then comparing it to a database of a million songs, the software can recommend similar pieces of music, and even rank them by characteristics, like their key or dance-ability.

It combines acoustic analysis with a data mining engine that crawls the web looking for music reviews and other textual information that might also give clues to what the piece of music is like.