InDaily is the first major website to host a web technology innovation that promises to transform the experience of arts journalism.

Beginning this week, readers of InDaily arts stories and music reviews will be able to experience previews of the artist’s work in real time and judge it for themselves.

All you need to do is roll over the artist’s name with your mouse pointer – Midnight Oil or Cold Chisel, for example – to hear a sample of what you’re reading about. And if you love the music enough, you also have the option to purchase it, right then and there.

[The product is still in development, but works on most browsers. If you don’t see artists’ names underlined in an InDaily story, try refreshing the page.]

The web service is called Mixvisor. It was developed by music lovers and entrepreneurs Nicholas Slattery, 23, and Giles Butler, 28.

They met at a Sydney start-ups competition, where their group took out first place for the idea of an intuitive online music service which would add to the experience of reading arts journalism online.

“We thought: we want something that users will love, so that it’s not just an ad,” says Slattery, an engineer, amateur music producer and former intern at InDaily‘s print predecessor, The Independent Weekly.

“First priority is user experience; something that people actually want.

“We are actually ideal users, so we have that perspective, too.

“And we want something that publishers want, because it keeps users on their page.”

Mixvisor uses a library of more than six million artists on iTunes, combined with the entrepreneurs’ own natural language processing program, to automatically provide readers with previews of the music about which they are reading.

“Our software, which uses natural language processing, can pick up the artist in a sentence,” Slattery says.

The closest thing to Mixvisor going around at the moment, he says, is a set of plug-ins that automatically show advertisements in online pieces of text using a similar system of natural language processing.

But the main goal for Slattery and Butler was to develop a product which added to the user experience of reading articles online, rather than detracting from it.

“We see it as just a time saver from the user end. We’re trying not to be an advertisement.

“We’re saying: here’s a useful thing – do you want to listen to some music?”

Mixvisor founders Giles Butler (left) and Nicholas Slattery.

Slattery is now working part-time on the business side of the project, while Butler – a former senior front-end developer for the Commonwealth Bank – works full-time, further honing Mixvisor’s natural language processing software.

“There are very few false positives now,” says Slattery.

“If it gets any better, that’s just an awesome bonus.”

InDaily is the first major online publisher to install Mixvisor, and Slattery and Butler have big aspirations for their product in the future.

Slattery says he has received a warm reception to Mixvisor everywhere he has pitched it, including to international publishers and large ticketing agencies.

“They’re so big that our servers can’t handle it yet, which is the best problem you can have,” he says.

“So we’ve got a few upgrades to do before we can get there.

“Everyone is very receptive. Everyone wants it; everyone thinks it’s a good idea.”

Over the long term, the pair also hope to expand Mixvisor to recognise movies, television series and online applications.

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