
Show HN: Dancemusic.wtf – Quiz Game for Learning Electronic Dance Music Styles - Tjorvens
http://dancemusic.wtf/
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jdietrich
Nice work. I would quibble with some of the genre classifications. The game
told me that _Acperience_ by Hardfloor is classic trance, when it's quite
clearly acid house. It classified _Want You_ by Bearson as future garage,
which it clearly isn't. It told me that _Porcelain_ by Moby is "Ambient
breaks/Illbient", which isn't a connection I would have made. It also seemed
to wrongly categorise a couple of tracks as Hi-NRG, although I missed their
names. I don't think that anyone from within the rave scene has ever used the
term "breakbeat hardcore"; the Wikipedia article for the genre is totally
devoid of references.

Personally, I think that a bit of simplification might be in order. A lot of
tracks don't neatly fit into any genre and a lot of genres are pedantic labels
rather than actual musical movements. A more concise and less contentious set
of genres might be more useful to newcomers and less irritating to
cratediggers. Learning the difference between Chicago house and Balearic house
is very valuable if you're just starting to explore dance music, but I'm not
sure there a useful delineation between Euro trance, classic trance,
progressive trance and epic trance.

Also, a tracklisting at the end of the game would be very useful.

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evanelias
> I don't think that anyone from within the rave scene has ever used the term
> "breakbeat hardcore"; the Wikipedia article for the genre is totally devoid
> of references.

Really? I've seen that term used for quite a long time, since the late 90s at
least. Sometimes I see the variations "hardcore rave", "UK rave", "oldschool
UK hardcore".

I don't know if folks in the early UK rave scene actually called it "breakbeat
hardcore" in the early 90s, but it's a relatively common term for that genre
in my experience. Granted, it's been 25 years since the genre was regularly
encountered, so it's more of a historical/throwback thing at this point :)

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strictnein
If you want a "classic" internet guide to electronic genres (as in, it was
built in flash and has been around forever), as well as an opinionated history
lesson, Ishkur's guide is great:

[http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/](http://techno.org/electronic-
music-guide/)

~~~
meatsock
ishkur wrote this completely tounge in cheek, it's a snarky satire. there are
entirely made up genres and artists and not a whole lot of ways to tell what's
accurate and what is not.

for example, there is no such thing as speedbass.

~~~
morsch
Be that as it may, I've never found something comparable in terms of rapid
music discovery and segmentation. I'd pay money for a version that
(crucially:) works as well and is regularly updated.

~~~
prithee
This isn't what you want in terms of dynamic content, but I wanted to bring it
into the conversation just because of the breadth of segmentation --
[http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html)

~~~
morsch
Thanks, very cool.

The instaplay samples from somewhere in the middle of a representative song
are what makes this work so well, I think.

It's striking how different it feels compared to MusicMap from the sibling
post (which is also neat): MusicMap plays the entire song from the start, so
it takes a while for each song to get going. The YouTube embed also takes a
second or two to initialise.

Every Noise at Once, on the other hand, gives you a fairly good idea what a
genre or artist is a about the moment you click the link. Very similar to
Ishkur's Guide in that regard!

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Tjorvens
Heyoo HN. Finished this side project of mine during the weekend. Read more
about it on GitHub:
[https://github.com/Hemmingsson/dancemusic.wtf](https://github.com/Hemmingsson/dancemusic.wtf)

Let me know if you have any feedback!

~~~
sago
Nice job. Here is my suggestion.

If the aim is to educate, it would be good to get a bit of feedback on the
wrong answers. So if it said

"This is breakbeat, breakbeat is characterised by..."

I'm not big into EDM, so I thought it would be good to learn something, but I
didn't feel like I came out any more informed.

~~~
rhcom2
I agree, I found myself googling most of the answers to get an idea of what
the terms even meant.

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akx
Nice :)

155457 points before I ran out of lives (due to ambiguous tracks mostly ;) )

A couple things:

* There are some typos here and there (in genre names and in the UI)

* The timing of the game could be tightened up a little

* Would be nice to know how long I have for a given track, and how it affects my score. I was surprised more than once by the track changing from underneath me. (I assume I get more points for quick answers?)

* Maybe a non-infinite mode too, like... 10 questions, 3 lives?

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sarreph
This is great, and educational too! After playing quite a few rounds, I
noticed I wasn't played any of the more esoteric categories such as
'(free)tek(k)no' and 'french house' — seemed to most commonly fall on the
bigger categories. Perhaps this is to be representative of the music
landscape, but I fear that people won't hear enough of the lesser categories
in order to learn from them.

I had fun, but one small criticism would be to speed up the time between
rounds. The music quiz on the original iPod was a favourite time-waster of
mine as a kid, and that was so addictive because it was quick to move to the
next song.

Finally, if anyone is interested in a video walkthrough to the different
electronic genres, this video helped me out immensely a couple of years ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4r0MdBQI6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4r0MdBQI6U)

~~~
reubenmorais
Yeah, I noticed that most of the songs were coming from the more common
genres. Maybe the game is sampling the song first, and then three other genres
to go in the buttons, which would cause this. Sampling four genres and then
picking a song from one of them would lead to a more diverse offering.

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LostCharacter
I really like this but 2 things: 1) I really wish there was a pause button. 2)
Please notify the user that it is using their YouTube account to play music.
My YT history has now blown up with songs, and it felt kind of invasive.

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cecilpl2
Very cool and I love the idea! I agree with sago that feedback on wrong
answers would be super helpful. I'd like a brief description of the genre I
guessed and the one it actually was.

Also, maybe links to youtube when you post the song title so I can save it for
later if I liked it!

Also also, maybe a "beginner" option that restricts it to the (say) 20 most
common genres. As someone who isn't super into EDM, the fine distinctions are
lost on me.

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strictnein
This was super fun. A little bit of feedback:

The text telling you what the song was that just played goes away way too
fast. It'd be nice if it stayed longer, or if a list built up somewhere to
reference later.

Also, I may be crazy, and random things happen, but I swear 70% of the correct
answers were the #1 option.

edit: At 72,000 or so points and haven't seen #4 show up as the correct
answer.

~~~
jgh
i think it's your rng seed cause i've seen some 4's.

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golergka
...and on the very first question this site makes the classic mistake of
calling 2010's brostep scene (in this case, Pendulum) "dubstep".

Dubstep is a 00s dark and slow genre, unlistenable without frequencies below
150 Hz, from classic labels like Deep Medi Musik, Hyperdub, Tectonic, Tempa
and others. Skrillex, Pendulum (which, btw, are more drum and bass
influenced), Knife Party and other, mostly american, loud EDM artists have
evolved from original dubstep, but have a very different sound.

I'm not trying to be elitist, and I don't think that one kind of music can be
objectively better than other (only in my own personal view, which is of no
consequence to other people). But calling two very different things with one
word is just bad for communication.

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stinos
I was expecting this to mess up the lesser known styles (wouldn't be the first
time I see a list of 'all' electronic music clearly written by someone who
clearly only knows house in all it's variations and then just mentions there's
also techno and dnb) but this one is pretty good and accurate actually.

One thing I wonder: how were the names chosen? E.g. I know what's meant with
'(free)tek(k)no' and 'hardcore techno/rave' but I don't think anyone actually
calls it like that. At least not around here. We use names like
tek/hardcore/rave and that's 3 quite different genres. Maybe the names were
picked to reflect a mix of what people call it?

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fishtoaster
That's very cool! As a nascent metalhead, I'd love to see a clone of this for
that genre - I often have trouble telling my prog metal from my power metal.

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dylan604
Why does this kick my CPU into high gear, and suck the battery life out of my
laptop? This is a serous drawback to what is an otherwise fun idea. I keep
playing it, but man it's a serious heat generator to the point that I'm joking
that I must be mining coins for the site to make money.

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qkls
I almost exclusively listen to electronic music, but at least one of the
choices was always a genre I haven't heard of. For example, I couldn't guess
that Huoratron was "Fidget House / Complextro" though I have listened to him
for years.

The game was fun though, only a tad slow to progress.

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disko
Nice, but classifications can be better. The Deep House track wasn't really
exemplary IMO :) Then you hear Larry Heard - Can You Feel It which is
classified as Chicago/Garage house...

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wingerlang
Nice, but it's very slow to progress.

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slowmotarget
Awesome! We need the same for metal music

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8bitsrule
Fun idea, and some great tracks. Be cool to pause game and goto YT and hear
the whole track.

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harel
This is great fun, and aptly named: Dancemusic WTF. I find aspect of the
seemingly infinite genres in electronic music very much WTF. Long ago i
resorted to just call it all Techno (or "Dance music" if the mood strikes) and
I use only two sub genres - tunes I like, and tunes I do not like. How can one
keep up?

~~~
jdietrich
Trainspotters love to invent new sub-sub-sub genres, but hardly anyone
actually uses those terms. There's a well-established taxonomy of dance music
based on broad stylistic differences; Beatport and Juno both list about 30
genres, which I think is more than sufficient for any practical purpose.

~~~
harel
Indeed it is enough. As a former "dance music" producer, I always struggled
with the classifications. I think other types of music suffer the same sub-
genre affliction though.

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AngryData
I failed miserably, but I only really listen to drum and bass or jungle these
days.

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moondowner
This would look like a good test for someone applying for maintaining DI.FM
channels.

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jonahrd
Could definitely use a sharing feature to compete with friends!

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loganed
I had a blast playing this. I cant be critical at all.

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pinebox
Needs a volume slider.

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kabacha
Cool, but frustratingly slow.

Also what's the point of genres like "French House" and "Detroit Techno" etc.
These genres are ridiculous to the point where it sounds like satire.

~~~
ryanlaws
Detroit Techno isn't obscure at all. It's a very well-established genre
including probably most famously the work by Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and
Kevin Saunderson. There have been at least 2 waves of it and it continues to
influence electronic music from the fringes to the mainstream. If you're
curious about it, I'd recommend Drexciya's The Quest as a starting point.

French House most likely refers the heavily filtered and compressed disco
beats of e.g. Daft Punk, which had its heyday in the mid-to-late 1990s.

