
Every Noise at Once - neka
http://everynoise.com/
======
sehugg
_Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated,
readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data
tracked and analyzed for 3,294 genres by Spotify as of 2019-07-29. The
calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more
mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier
and bouncier._

Lots of other cool Spotify-scraping projects by the author at the bottom.

~~~
colordrops
Interesting choice of dimensions... So basically how human and how
rhythmically distinct.

Edit: so out of curiosity I looked at the bottom right corner and found
"tanci". Odd name. Clicked on it, and it's Chinese spoken word artists.
Incidentally I practice Chinese so it's perfect.

~~~
dmitriid
> Interesting choice of dimensions...

IIRC, there are 14 dimensions in total, but it’s impossible to represent all
of them on a page. So he went for up-down, left-right, clusters, and colors to
represent a subset of them.

Source: used to work at Spotify.

~~~
yreg
What do the colours mean?

~~~
dmitriid
Unfortunately, I can't remember :( COuld be rythm or number of instruments.

------
stuntkite
This reminds me of the old school flash app Ishkur's Guide to Electronic
Music. Man was that thing ahead of it's time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishkur%27s_Guide_to_Electronic_Music)

~~~
Avery3R
[https://twitter.com/Ishkur23](https://twitter.com/Ishkur23) A new version is
coming out in a couple of weeks(supposedly).

~~~
antihero
Oh my god, no way! That guide shaped my entire music taste. I'd spend fucking
hours trawling through it.

One thing that's really funny is now with my current taste, going back on
there and re-listening to the clips of artists that are now in my mainstay.

------
morgosmaci
Talk about false advertising. I couldn't find the button that plays all of the
samples at the same time.

~~~
Verdex
I was hoping for that as well ... however the thing that I found was much
better than my expectations. So I think it's ultimately okay.

If you still feel that you didn't get what you were looking for ... here's an
acceptable substitute perhaps?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5h3qXAQOQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5h3qXAQOQI)

------
doctorRetro
I don't get it. I mean, I understand what I'm looking at; a word cloud of
music genres that is each linked to a sample. That part I got. But when you
label your website 'Every Noise at Once'... I kind of expect to hear multiple
(perhaps not 'every') noises at the same time.

~~~
cronix
I was expecting to just hear white noise. Isn't that what all frequencies is
added together, like the color white is all colors added together?

~~~
robmiller
White noise is equal energy across all frequencies linearly. Sounds hissy
because there are more frequencies included within each musical octave as you
go higher.

A more even-sounding spectrum is pink noise which is equal energy per base 2
logarithmic bandwidth. Sounds like a waterfall.

------
rpmisms
The bottom of the page is a little weird. "Byzantine" is not Russian
Liturgical Music.

This is Byzantine Chant: [https://youtu.be/Bs--5yMg1g0](https://youtu.be/Bs--
5yMg1g0)

Also, Georgian Polyphony did not involve strings as a general rule. There were
regional exceptions, but early Slavic polyphony was generally a capella.

Here's a good example of Gerogian polyphony: [https://v-s.mobi/elia-lrdei-
princeton-georgian-choirs-fall-2...](https://v-s.mobi/elia-lrdei-princeton-
georgian-choirs-fall-2011-02:19)

Sorry to nitpick, but I hate to see a fascinating corner of music ignored.
Happy Listening!

~~~
pwinnski
Spotify, and other commercial online sources, have long failed to get genres
like "classical" right. It sounds like they're screwing up "Byzantine" as
well, which is sadly unsurprising.

~~~
aidenn0
Well it classifies Three Dog Night and Grand Funk Railroad as "Southern Rock"
so it is certainly not perfect for other genre's either.

------
nrjames
Where this site really shines is when you get into a genre that links to a
series of linked Spotify playlists. Pretty awesome for exploring Intro, Edge,
Pulse, playlists of genres of music you like. It's great for discovery of new
artists.

~~~
mmazing
Yeah, I've been searching for a specific genre (what to even call it) for a
long time and I feel like this site just gave me a treasure trove of artists I
didn't know about.

+1 from me

~~~
wingerlang
Same here, in a specific genre I like all the artists were clumped together.

Would be cool to see something like this on song-level, not artist/group.

------
n3k5
Filthstep didn't sound anything like what I was expecting. But I didn't really
_know_ what to expect. So then I selected some genres for which I could
confidently propose an exemplary piece. Ragga jungle: precisely correct.
Chicago blues: nailed it. Ragtime: the very archetype. Schranz: maybe that's
the intro of a track that eventually meanders into schranz, but the clip on
hand is way off. Swedish pop: pretty good. Glitch hop: no way. Gospel singers:
US centric, but OK. Nigerian Hip Hop: yeah that's sort of valid in the sense
that 2Baba is a Nigerian hip hop producer, but that sample is neither
especially Nigerian nor particularly hippy-hoppy. Electro swing: all thumbs
up. Bury St Edmunds Indie: A truly sublime blend of Sudbury angst and Lavenham
melancholy, virtouosly caramelised in Ipswich je-ne-sais-quoi. (Yes of course
I'm joking about that last one; the combination of specific location with
vague genre is just absurd.)

This seems like a useful tool for discoveling new sounds, but when it comes to
finding out what Polish free jazz really sounds like, I wouldn't trust it one
bit.

~~~
wilsonrocks
I believe Bury St Edmunds _does_ have an established indie scene... Not sure
if it developed it's own sound though?

~~~
DanBC
Bury St Edmonds is musically interesting.

[https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/68n44v/the-ill-fated-
tale...](https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/68n44v/the-ill-fated-tale-of-bury-
st-edmunds-the-british-market-town-john-peel-dubbed-the-new-seattle)

------
bduerst
Previous HN Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269685)

It's a great music discovery service that I've used several times in the past.
I've found some good artists this way, and really wish someone would build
something similar for fiction books. The only downside is it's tied
exclusively to Spotify.

------
captn3m0
I’ve been told multiple times that I don’t really have a taste in music,
because I listen to a confusing mix of genres.

This is perfect for me. So much more to discover.

~~~
jerf
You're not the only one. I have tastes in music, even strong ones, but they
don't tend to follow the way genres seem to be split at _all_.

Defining a genre by its characteristic instrument set, for instance, doesn't
match how I tend to react to things very well, but it's a fairly popular way
of separating genres, it seems. (I'm not saying I don't understand the use of
that metric, it's very, well, _available_ , in the sense of "availability
heuristic". But I do not _personally_ find it all that useful.)

------
Fellshard
Here I was expecting silence, as each sound - including each sound's inverse -
was played simultaneously.

~~~
stefco_
Depends how you take the sum!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_series#Absolute_conv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_series#Absolute_convergence)

[edit] See my comment below: my joke is about the fact that, depending on the
_order_ in which you sum an infinite sequence of waveforms, you can create a
sequence that converges to _any_ sound you want [1] (as long as those
waveforms together span the full frequency space). Note also that a sum over a
truly continuous space of arbitrary waveforms is even more ill-defined.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem)

~~~
ctrl-j
Sound waves are physical. You cannot change the empirical outcome by doing the
math differently.

Sound waves are indeed cancelled out by their inverse.

~~~
LanceH
Isn't the inverse of a sound the same sound?

~~~
bzbarsky
It's the same sound, but out of phase, so they cancel out. Think operating
principle of noise-canceling headphones.

------
VohuMana
I use this site a lot, it is pretty good for finding new music especially new
genres of music. I discovered Arab Metal last week which was pretty good.

~~~
dmerrick
My friends' band is in there as "Boston metal". Cool stuff!

------
heyplanet
For an interactive music map with bands, check out Music-Map:

[https://www.music-map.com](https://www.music-map.com)

You start at a band of your choice and then can travel all the bands in the
world.

------
fao_
It's sad that it only has one example for tanci, a genre I discovered due to
this list, that aside from wikipedia is barely documented on the internet.
After some searching I've managed to recover about 6 hours / 58 tracks of
tanci in a spotify playlist -- most of it under the 'various artists' tag, one
of the reasons why it was difficult to find any artists, I expect. I'm sure
spotify has more of it and that it's uncategorized and badly labelled.

You can find it here, if anyone is interested:
[https://open.spotify.com/user/gallefray/playlist/6CzafKwRUi5...](https://open.spotify.com/user/gallefray/playlist/6CzafKwRUi5UcBqsv3VAPF?si=dnlleoNJSsGyBLMoZx-
vTw)

------
jaypeg25
This site just gave me a nostalgic flashback to the type of thing I'd stumble
across (heh) via StumbleUpon.

------
SeanLuke
How are these genres being plotted? What are the axes? What are the text
colors?

~~~
sauwan
At the bottom of the page it describes this a little better:

>The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more
mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier
and bouncier.

Not sure about the colors though.

------
karmoka
You guys should check out Quebec related music :) Some pretty good bands up
here.

------
tzs
The artist search is very picky. E.g., "cat ctevens" does not work. "yusuf"
does not work. But "yusuf / cat stevens" works.

Some of the genre memberships seem odd. Barry McGuire is bubblegum pop? As is
Zager & Evans? Roy Orbison? That whole category seems to be a weird mashup of
what I'd expect in bubblegum pop plus a random dump of '60s rock.

For artists that appear in more than one genre, it seems to use the same
sample clip for all of them, so don't be put off from checking out an artist
in a genre you like because the sample doesn't fit.

------
ssewell
Wow! I'm having flashbacks to Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music.

------
Avery3R
The examples this site chooses aren't the greatest... It maps an entire artist
to a genre, so when one artist makes multiple genres of music the examples end
up being very off. Take dubstep for example, the artist they chose for the
example is Skream, one of the people who popularized dubstep, but the song
they chose is his latest release "Otto's Chant" which is tech house, not
dubstep. Skream hasn't even made any dubstep in quite a while.

------
colorincorrect
Missing a few modern genres such as Bubblegum Bass and Deconstructed Club.
Would be interested to see what this site has to say about those genres.

------
asow92
Reminds me of [https://www.surfr.fm/music](https://www.surfr.fm/music)

------
Animats
Somebody could probably write a program to generate new EDM sub-sub-genres.
Somebody probably already has.

Good problem for adversarial learning. Train one ML system to rate EDM, trying
to match some metric like total sales. Second system tries to generate EDM
which gets high scores from the first system.

------
Zanneth
One of my favorite things to do is listen to music in foreign languages.
(Turkish pop is my favorite. Check out Tarkan or Ismail YK if your ears are
curious.) This site is a fantastic way to discover more music from around the
world. Great resource!

------
bjowen
The title, if not the content, reminded me of this awesomeness:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=wanpSQXU_3Y](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=wanpSQXU_3Y)

------
zadkey
I was disappointed that I didn't see Bagpipe Folk Dubstep. ;)

Here is an example in case you thought I was making up this genre:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-s8wefKlA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-s8wefKlA)

------
dmd
I wish the clustering made any sense at all. "Lullabye" and "marching band"
are nearest neighbors?

------
Tade0
So many bands from the "progressive alternative" genre are now either defuct
or stopped releasing material.

~~~
billyc74
same for this genre called "classical", whatever that is.

------
867-5309
Ukrainian Choir are nnexed to nothing

------
SideburnsOfDoom
Incomplete

for starters, no Kwela, Mbaqanga, Marabi, or Highlife. Allthough here is
Kwaito

------
AareyBaba
Amused to find Pakistani Pop right next to Christmas music and Polka.

------
ryan-allen
I love this, I am going to discover so much new music!

