
Every Noise at Once – an algorithmically-generated scatter-plot of musical genre - nyodeneD
http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
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dreen
This is awesome. There is also this old thing: [http://techno.org/electronic-
music-guide/](http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/)

Similar effort, but purely editorial and only about electronic music, with
commentary

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Roodgorf
Thank you! I've been looking for this since the first time I found it I don't
even remember how long ago! I found it really interesting.

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kazinator
With so many categories of rock, you have to be careful about how you angle
your guitar pick when hitting the next chord; you just might derail into
another genre by accident.

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sageabilly
This is amazing! I wonder how it would compare to the algorithm that Spotify
uses to suggest music to users. I've always found Spotify's recommendations to
be very tightly banded and think they could benefit from more genre-hopping.

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carlob
The snippet for Italian punk is neither Italian nor punk, kinda makes you
wonder about the quality of the original data. Probably it would make more
sense to coarse grain a little bit more if you can't trust the data.

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glennmcdonald
Hah. There WAS an Italian punk band called Arturo, but that "Arturo"
definitely wasn't them. Fixed. This is a perpetual source of trouble, but
finer distinctions actually help deal with this, as they produce more-specific
audio profiles, which gives the filters a better chance to recognize a mis-
attributed song as an outlier for the genre...

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kriro
This is awesome, didn't realize you can actually click to get a sample which
is amazing. Most stuff I checked out was correctly filed, too.

Would be cool to ad a crowd sourcing element to suggest changes to get an even
better base.

An undo for the "listened to this" icon would also be helpful.

Searching for my favorite band (Savatage) they are in roughly the right
categories (all sorts of metal) but in sum too far away from classical. Dunno
how to express this better, seems like a complex problem though.

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emodendroket
This is nitpicking, but it's kind of weird that there are tons of genres I've
never heard of but no modal jazz.

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jkleiser
Very cool! However, the "zydeco" sample wasn't typical zydeco at all. I guess
it was Wayne Toups, and I'm sure he can do some real groovy zydeco, but this
wasn't. ;-)

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toothbrush
How 'glitch' came to be placed so close to 'classic Dutch pop' escapes me...
Fascinating to hunt around in though! Much more fun than writing my
dissertation!

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klodolph
Probably a lot of that is the particular choice of projection into 2D space.

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huskyr
This is an old project, but nevertheless really good. The 'related' artists
are spot-on, and it has lots of obscure bands.

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s_kilk
Not entirely relevant, but I was quite pleased with the example tracks for
Black Metal and Doom Metal.

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Drup
More than that, It's very interesting to look at one of the (numerous) metal
subgenre and see how the various band are mapped, defining tendencies in the
subgenre. It works very well in power and doom metal, in particular.

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317070
It puts "breakcore"[1] between "boy band" and "new romantic". I do see some
similar genres in the area (deep breakcore, intelligent dance music), but I
reckon a dimension has been squashed which was essential in positioning the
entire area of music around IDM. They lie scattered between genres of music
with which they have little to no connection.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7qmAMkksA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7qmAMkksA)

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emodendroket
The blurb doesn't seem to imply that genres close together are in any way
related; just that they have some similar characteristics. It doesn't strike
me as entirely improbable that there are some surprises there.

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glennmcdonald
That's right. This map begins as a scatter-plot, not a force-network, so
particularly in the middle of the map individual pairwise distances in these
two dimensions can be perfect or misleading. The readability adjustments to
keep the names from landing on top of each other also distort the data in a
technical sense.

But if you go into a genre's own page and scroll down, there is a little inset
map of that genre's immediate neighborhood. That view is restricted to the
most similar genres according to ALL the dimensions, so breakcore's
neighborhood, for example ([http://everynoise.com/engenremap-
breakcore.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap-breakcore.html)) doesn't
include "boy band" at all.

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emodendroket
Still plenty of surprises... I like enka a lot but I wouldn't have anticipated
any of the things it's associated with... "deep filthstep?"
[http://everynoise.com/engenremap-enka.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap-
enka.html)

edit: Oh, I'm probably looking at it backwards and those are the least similar
genres. "Classic Chinese pop" and various folk musics are less surprising.

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glennmcdonald
Yeah, the top one is the neighborhood, the inverted-color one is the opposite
neighborhood
([http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=393](http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=393))...

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linuxlizard
Is fun just browsing through the genre names.

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g0rfel
The scatter plot looks like Denmark.

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anon4
How has this not been hit with a million DMCA claims and erased from the
internet yet?

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vemek
Looks like it uses an embedded Spotify player, with playlists for each genre.
Also, the main page only plays snippets.

