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Show HN: SongBranch – An interactive song lyric visualization experiment
- jojohack 11y agoFor those that are interested, I'm basically using lyrics-fetcher to conduct the song searches (via http://makeitpersonal.co http://makeitpersonal.co) and Springy for the core visualization.
- mclovinwhy 11y agoNice job, Bob Dylan's songs are fun to watch on this
- jojohack 11y agoThanks! I'm a HUGE Bob Dylan fan, incidentally :)
- nicoboo 11y agoEminem's songs can be used to stress-test the visualization
- aembleton 11y agoThey certainly can: http://songbranch.com/?artistName=eminem&songTitle=the%20real%20slim%20shady http://songbranch.com/?artistName=eminem&songTitle=the%20rea...
- lioeters 11y agoExcellent example of a stress test - of course it's people on HN who would think of doing something like this. I wonder if the whole genre of rap and hip hop is particularly difficult to process, due to the sheer number of words in each song.
- jojohack 11y agoThanks for stress testing! I made a fix this morning to reduce the graph spazziness :)
- jonty 11y agoHah, I did something similar around ~2007 when I was at Last.fm and never got around to publishing it. Nice work! This is the only example I can find lying around in my backups: http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png
- jojohack 11y agoThanks, jonty. I like your layout choice, makes it more readable. What do the colors and arrow tips represent?
- FoeNyx 11y ago> What do the colors and arrow tips represent? Dunno about the arrow tips, but seems like the slowly changing colors enable you to quite easily follow the original order of the lyrics. (except if the reader is color blind)
- vinchuco 11y agoI thought it was this at the beginning. Like the color maze near 3/4 through this page https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/ https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/
- jonty 11y agoI actually had a version using force-directed layout very similar to yours, took me a while to decide on this version! Each colour is a verse, fading through the spectrum. An unfilled arrowhead shows a transition between words in a line of a verse, a filled arrowhead shows a transition between lines.
- jojohack 11y agoThat's a pretty neat approach, maybe I should do something similar. Originally I color-coded the words (based on frequency) but having a gradual spectrum applied to the edges feels a lot more intuitive.
- MaxLeiter 11y agoReally awesome work, something cool (but I have no idea how feasable) would be listening to the song while you jump around. Other than that awesome work
- jojohack 11y agoGreat suggestion, I had originally wanted to create something like that, but I figure folks can just open up a separate YouTube window for that. Would also love to have the timing be in sync (ala Karaoke) but I'm not aware of any open database that stores that kind of metadata.
- jonty 11y agoI believe MusixMatch has timing data (it's what the Shazam karaoke mode uses), however I'm unsure if the free API allows access to it. Worth a look though. https://developer.musixmatch.com https://developer.musixmatch.com
- jojohack 11y agoThanks jonty, looks like a fine resource, though it's a bit expensive to use ($25000)
- revisiond 11y agoThis is cool. Thanks for sharing. I tried a long song with a lot of unique lines and the detailed view is a jumbled mess that won't stop erratically moving. See Redemption's Sapphire for an example.
- jojohack 11y agoHaha yup - maybe not so great for epic ballads :)
- whiddershins 11y agoyeah, try Lou Reed's Street Hassle ... ;-)
- jojohack 11y agoThanks for stress testing, I made a fix this morning to reduce the spazziness :)
- cwilkes 11y agoThat's fun, I did KC and the Sunshine Band "Shake your booty" http://i.imgur.com/ia6RNHK.png http://i.imgur.com/ia6RNHK.png mainly just to see how many arrows would go to the word "shake"
- stared 11y agoNice idea (BTW: how does it cut text into sequences of words) abut the search is crappy (I tried a few times, no results). Maybe a single search (for both author and title) with references as you type? It would be really, really helpful.
- jojohack 11y agoGood suggestion, I had thought of having a single field earlier (delimiting artist and title with a '-') but I thought that most users might find it cumbersome. To generate the final graph, I started by more or less splitting the entire song into a list of words, then iteratively rejoining fragments in an order based on frequency of occurrence.
- stared 11y agoActually I meant without having to write it all (especially as artists have a few names, e.g. with different initials). So e.g. after writing "Rammstein" I would be getting "Rammstein - Sonne", "Rammstein - Amerika" etc. So, something Google-like rather than SQL-query-like.
- mintplant 11y agoDaft Punk's "Technologic" is entertaining: https://i.imgur.com/JKxZ8zC.png https://i.imgur.com/JKxZ8zC.png Nice work! Wish it had sharable URLs for specific songs.
- jojohack 11y agoLove it :) The share buttons actually use the current page you are on, but I can see how it would be much more useful to just update the URL based on the search pattern. Until I fix that, here's an example of how to deep link to a particular search: http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=technologic http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=tech...
- mintplant 11y agoAh, thanks! I missed the share button. I shared a screenshot (with credit) to r/DaftPunk which got a kick out of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/4b4l3m/technologic_the_flowchart/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/4b4l3m/technologi...
- underyx 11y agoWhere does the lyrics data come from? I've looked into lyrics datasets before for side projects, but copyright seems to be crippling everyone's attempts at providing them.
- jojohack 11y agoAgreed, I've had similar difficulty. I ended up using http://makeitpersonal.co http://makeitpersonal.co since it appeared to have decent coverage of most of the songs I searched on.
- pimlottc 11y agoVery interesting, played around a number of songs, though it seems to wig out badly on "Born Slippy": http://songbranch.com/?artistName=underworld&songTitle=born+slippy http://songbranch.com/?artistName=underworld&songTitle=born+...
- vinchuco 11y agoReminds me of infinite jukebox for endlessly playing a song without it becoming too tedious from repetition http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html
- MegaLeon 11y agoThis is amazing! Well done. Blues flows beautifully. My colleague wanted to know if this uses d3.js?
- jojohack 11y agoI used Springy.JS ( http://getspringy.com/ http://getspringy.com/ ) It's a pretty awesome library.