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Music-Map – Find Similar Music
- slmjkdbtl 3y agoTried 3, one gives me unrelated results, one good results, and one doesn't exist. Still very useful, but I hope the text won't float around which makes it hard to click, vertical list would be great.
- autoexec 3y agoI had good results with selecting all and then pasting into a text file. Not sure if the things at the top of the list ended up being "closer" or not, but at least I had a simple list of names to check out.
- maxverse 3y agoThis project was one of the major inspirations for my learning to code a decade ago, and I still turn to it sometimes when I'm looking to make sense of what kind of music a band plays
- dumbo-octopus 3y agoCool concept and the UI is well executed. The results themselves were somewhat hit and miss for me - Purity Ring was a nice discovery related to Grimes, but the Lorde results were all somewhat "Eh". I wonder how an Album based version would fare - i.e. focus on Solar Power, not Melodrama.
- boznz 3y agoThe UI seems to be a single input box, pretty sure nobody can F** that up
- dumbo-octopus 3y agoDid you miss the results page?
- thomastjeffery 3y agoI'm a huge fan of Purity Ring, and most of the artists I looked at seemed to a solid gathering of familiar neighbors. Unfortunately, that means this graph is pretty similar to the Spotify one I usually wander around. I'll definitely have to spend some more serious time with it, though. I would recommend you listen to iamiwhoami, Crywolf, AWAY, Chrome Sparks, Of the Trees, Sam Gellaitry, Burial, James Blake (especially his early stuff), and SOPHIE; for a good variety of directions.
- LiquidPolymer 3y agoI’ve been wanting something like this for a long time. My tastes are a little offbeat sometimes. Wax Tailor, one of my favorite artists, uses sampled dialogue from films, educational programs, corporate videos and whatnot to create quite interesting sonic creations that I just love. I wish more we’re creating similar types of music (I just found Biosphere’s “Petrified Forest” which is themed to that old movie - and again I love it). I’ve had very little luck except an occasional one-off from DJ Shadow, or Aim. I’m not familiar with some of the artists that show up in relation to Wax Tailor on this map - but the ones I do know are not the same vibe.
- Cruncharoo 3y agoListened to a few Wax Tailor songs, reminds me a lot of Pretty Lights--at least the vibe. Pretty Lights doesn't do as much of the voice samples. Check out Pretty Lights' album Taking Up Your Precious Time, you might dig it.
- defrost 3y agoFrom three decades past: Colourbox - Just Give 'Em Whiskey (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dm_iq5OicM with a notable mention to their Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shoot Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0r6d6MwR9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0r6d6MwR9k .. these are the folk that later collaborated to form M|A|R|R|S of Pump Up the Volume fame There's an interesting French bit of old film digital cutting together with some samples and sountrack from Polo & Pan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVW63Z_8deE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVW63Z_8deE that might strike a chord - they appear not so far from Wax Tailor when entered.
- at_a_remove 3y agoHah! Are you my lost twin? I have tried various approaches to search for something to Wax Tailor's "Que Sera" and have found only Barry Adamson's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (you will recall from Lost Highway) and Venetian Snares' "Gloomy Sunday." If you have more that are similar, let me know.
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- SushiHippie 3y agoMy problem is that I like a song from one artist but not his other songs, because that one song is different than the others. I kind of hoped this site maps songs and not artists :/
- djbusby 3y agoYes. Somgs-like-this-song is the thing I wanna find.
- at_a_remove 3y agoI have found this to be terrifically difficult. I went to the trouble of going through Tom Waits' discography to find something similar to "Alice," without luck. Some of my best mixes take years to create. The problem, to me, breaks down into three separate difficulties, perhaps three and a half: First, if the Music Genome people are correct, the number of variables (if you will) is quite large, creating an enormous search space. I grant an extra half to the concept that portions of that search space would be sparsely populated. We are getting pretty good at searching these kinds of spaces (something I would like to know more about). Second, each person has a different idea of what similarity entails. For some it is instrumentation. Others, production value. Some are looking for lyrical subject similarity. And so forth. And most people are very much "I'll know it when I hear it," unable to really qualify that similarity function. It requires quite a bit of introspection, meta-cognition, and a good vocabulary to really describe what that target is. Right now, we're bad at that and have a bad habit of just throwing everything in a bucket. As an example, I might like some music with a fast tempo for some mood, but I might also like "darkjazz" (a microgenre which more or less collapsed about seven or so years back). Most recommender systems would then pick out some fast, "hot" jazz, which I absolutely do not want, but it has the tempo of some things I do like and the genre of something else I like. Third, the process of assigning values to said variables was quite labor intensive when they were doing it, as well as subjective. Highly trained musicians spending half an hour on each song (which means that, with that many variables, while the time seems long, the examination must be cursory). It would really be something to make progress in this area and I think it might be the most fruitful. However, I think any real progress in this area might mean you would need a corpus of at least a hundred thousand songs human-rated, each by multiple evaluators, then programs written for each of the, say 450 genes (if we are to use the Music Genome Project). Finally, the programs would be tweaked until they aligned with the ratings given by humans. It's one of those things I would fund if I were an eccentric billionaire.
- LiquidPolymer 3y agoWhenever I’ve had Peter Gabriel in a playlist I automatically get a lot of Genesis (Phil Collins era) mixed in. I’m aware PG was a founding member of Genesis, but when they split so did the music. They just aren’t similar in my mind. On this map they are right next to each other. Maybe the problem is me?
- defrost 3y agoAre you seeing much of Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Papa Wembe and other co-performers in the adjacency map?
- jacquesm 3y agoKate Bush <-> Maggie Reilly <-> Mike Oldfield would be good links, but she's not even on the page and Mike Oldfield doesn't show up on Reilly's page either.
- omnibrain 3y ago> Maybe the problem is me? No, it's just a flawed approach.
- SandmanDP 3y agoA similar website, but using genre clustering instead of artists: https://everynoise.com/ https://everynoise.com/
- tikkun 3y agoThis is the best one. Such a cool site.
- beaugunderson 3y agomuch, much better results and a wealth of additional features like several playlists for each genre, new releases, etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- laluneodyssee 3y agoThey other site in the network, Gnoosic, gave me some absolutely incredible recommendations. https://www.gnoosic.com https://www.gnoosic.com Lots of new albums to listen to over the weekend :)
- tgv 3y agoI just tried that with three classical composers, and got ... jazz bands?
- solardev 3y agoBack when humans still did work, the Music Genome Project had people listen to songs and try to break them down into little "genes" of metadata, everything from "vocal harmonies" to "minor chords" to "strong lyrical presence". It worked way better than the automated systems, IMO, and gave rise to Pandora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfl... I wish other music apps could license their recommendation system. Still nothing seems to come close.
- at_a_remove 3y agoYes, so amazingly labor-intensive. Now I have found some programs which boast of a feeble seventy percent accuracy in identifying the key of a song (if you were going to use the Camelot System to build a mix).
- jacquesm 3y agoHm... I never thought that would be extremely useful but I think I have that working close to perfection on piano (I need it for audio->midi->score conversion), I should probably try it on other styles of music as well.
- at_a_remove 3y agoSo, I am told -- and could be wrong -- that the subtle art of DJing requires many little tricks in tandem. Some are obvious, like similar tempos, similar "energy" (I have never heard a definition of this I could understand). Also, from one song to another, you're only supposed to move either major to minor, minor to major, or change just one letter. That's known as the Camelot method and it may be a lot of hot air. Another trick I heard was taught in schools was "don't tickle me with a feather and then hit me with a brick."
- handy2000 3y agoPandora still gives the best recommendations. I doubt the Music Genome Project will be matched by a purely computation analysis any time soon.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcint 3y agoProject by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mg All manually user-generated by people contributing <= 3 names through https://www.gnoosic.com/ https://www.gnoosic.com/, then voting on other names suggested in the same neighborhood of the graph. It would be cool data to get access to. But it's a nice singleton in the mean time. Like Netflix's challenge dataset, it would be interesting to have another layer of associations to compare with more formal genre lists. I wonder what kind of data Spotify releases.
- MrThoughtful 3y agoLooks like mg noticed us: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1730500804920955269 https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1730500804920955269
- tern 3y agoWow! Music recommenders come up every once in awhile on HN and they're almost alway unusable for underground music. Aside from not recognizing some of the names I tried, this one does quite well. It just needs quick links to listen to examples and it'll already be more useful than Spotify, Apple Music or Last.fm. Some test cases I used: Logic1000, Tessela, Piezo, TSVI, Two Shell, Caterina Barbieri, Schacke, Amnesia Scanner, Doss, Celyn June [fail], DJ Plead [fail], DVRTN [fail], JakoJako [poor results], LDS [needs disambiguation] This may already be a better approach, but has anyone built a music recommender that's based on published data (stuff you can find on Discogs) like record labels, aliases, collaborators, remixed-by, etc? As a listener mainly to dance, experimental, and contemporary classical music, I suspect a system based on simple metadata associations would easily beat other approaches.
- tjean_z 3y agoI also looked into more obsure bands I'm into. I suspect the relatedness is affected by the band lineups of previous tours
- defrost 3y agoHilariously King Stingray maps next to Wet Leg ... I'm guessing that's because they're both recent breakout bands based on an island . . . KS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo WL - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9jeJk2UHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9jeJk2UHQ
- kristopolous 3y agoThat's exactly what I've been working on. Choose it based on the people someone chose to work with and those networks. It's very much just a single user system that I haven't generalized because that's a way harder problem, the rules aren't generalizable. Classical music for instance, may have 15 names on the credits, a jazz record may have like 4 labels it gets placed on. Let's take an EP by a popular artist. It may have remixes by popular DJs. Those links are poor quality. Now if it's by an unknown artist, those links usually become high quality. So do you follow the network of the guy playing the oboe? Maybe? Sometimes weird connections like the album artist is the strong link, sometimes it's compilation albums that one of the songs is placed on. Take say the 1992 release Trancemaster 1: https://www.discogs.com/release/54719-Various-Trancemaster-Vol1 https://www.discogs.com/release/54719-Various-Trancemaster-V... the clustering of those artists is a very strong high quality link. And then there's the "that's what I call music" type compilations where they're worthless. I can do the music I like because I can narrow the ruleset but a general application is basically a winograd schema challenge because there's a large body of intuition required to weight the network. This task is certainly a nontrivial neural network problem. Doing it manually with human discretion works. I've got tools for doing that and large labeled data sets I've been working on for 4 years. It just doesn't generalize. Some day ...
- no_no_no_no 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoDoes it say anywhere what this is based on? Is it based on some index of 'genres' associated with artists or something? Some spotify/apple index or something they absorbed?
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoOh thanks below for explanation that it's surprisingly user generated/submitted! kinda crazy, but ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482492
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoIf you listen to any kind of underground dance/dj-related music, I never saw the need for any of these recommendation engines/databases. Radio, recorded sets, dj mixes are always the unbeatable curation. It's kind of the whole point.
- throwaway874839 3y agoThroughout all these years, I got convinced that human recommendations (those from a close circle of friends I trust) are the best source of music discovery. [Shameless plug] That's why I created https://digs.fm https://digs.fm, which is kinda like Goodreads but for music. Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
- Hamuko 3y agoThis website has fallen in the exact same "artist names are unique" trap that Last.fm did, making every single name that's used by two or more performers completely useless. There's also no name normalisation. I got a result where I saw at least five duplicated artist names because people can't agree on how to spell them.
- jacquesm 3y agoFirst artist I tried failed: Øystein Sevåg, also not in transliteration. David Benoit fared a lot better, Neneh Cherry matched Carmel(?) but not Youssou N'Dour with whom she had her most popular song. Interesting concept though I will definitely be playing around with it. Edit: long ago I did something like this but based on the individual band members so that you could trace them as they moved through their career, that might be another interesting angle to pursue as a weight on the links. But it's a boatload of work to track down all of the individuals that contributed to a track. Another angle is to go by producers and possibly even recording technician. Good luck untangling Alan Parsons and Trevor Horn from everything they touched, the page will be too crowded to read.
- defrost 3y agoNo neighbouring of David Bowie with your (first) namesake either: https://www.music-map.com/jacques+brel https://www.music-map.com/jacques+brel the shortest path there is through le port d'Amsterdam On transliteration, https://www.music-map.com/jasper+van%27t+hof https://www.music-map.com/jasper+van%27t+hof versus https://www.music-map.com/jasper+van+t%C2%B4hofs https://www.music-map.com/jasper+van+t%C2%B4hofs so there's a bit of jumble to work out in the data set - and neither of those seem to intersect https://www.music-map.com/angelique+kidjo https://www.music-map.com/angelique+kidjo which they should for their early collaboration - although Youssou N'Dour turns up near Angelique.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's an absolutely amazing song. It is just incredible how much energy he pours into that. And Ramses Shaffy should be another easy link from Jacques Brel. Angelique Kidjo ... her rendering of 'Summertime' is forever in my memory, live during the African Music Festival in Delft. She and Salif Keita stood out from the 10's of acts that were there. You can't really describe the kind of power those two radiated. Off the scale in every sense.
- defrost 3y agoI dare say you might just enjoy Buddy Guy and Angelique Kidjo belting out Voodoo Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN_K84TAxNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN_K84TAxNs
- amir734jj 3y agoI searched "Modern Talking" and it worked. Thank you
- p1esk 3y agoIt is pretty bad for classical composers - groups together completely unrelated, very different people: I typed Monteverdi and the closest neighbors shown are Scriabin, Britten, Poulenc, Faure, Schubert. It does not make any sense.
- drdaeman 3y agoI believe it's pretty bad for just about anything - at least, after a few tests, I haven't found a good example where it, indeed, provides meaningful and useful results. I wouldn't have an issue if it would say "check out what people also tend to listen to", but it's most certainly not "find similar music". I strongly suspect that it has no idea about music whatsoever, and probably falls into same association fallacy as most recommendation systems, basing relationship on co-occurrence rather than any inherent similarity.
- tgv 3y agoI tried Gerald Finzi. It shows Vaughn Williams with and without Ralph, mixes composers with performers, and adds rather unrelated composers. It also adds "Clocks and Clouds". This is either an instrumental trio that creates "epic" music, or a composition by Ligeti, neither of which is in the same category nor has any relation musically to Finzi. And it adds "Yak Bondy", which is inexplicable. I guess it just does things when there's not much data, but that makes it practically useless for discovery.
- Triphibian 3y agoI think I broke it. I found Peewee's Big Adventure, clicked through a bunch of movies to TV shows, found Starcraft and finally SUS, Amongus, Barack Obama and Walter White.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoI would love to select more than one artist at a time.
- placebo 3y agoCool. Created the same idea quite a few years ago. Also added the ability to traverse the network and view clips and info about the artists. The entire thing leverages one SQLite file. https://nocurve.com/musicmap/ https://nocurve.com/musicmap/ As the google API key is now invalid, you get to see how the clips were queried... ;-)
- roydivision 3y agoI realised recently that most media recommenders don't work for me because they are based on genre. If you like The Watchmen film, you're sure to like Marvel films because they're also action, and based on comics. We see you listened to Pearl Jam a lot, you're going to get a kick out of Nirvana. That's just not how I work. I like _good_ stuff, I don't confine myself to genres, I'll go anywhere if it's half decent. I want a service that says hey, you listened to Benny Goodman's Sing Sing Sing, you should check out The Thirteenth Floor Elevators' first album. The only recommendation that kinda works for me is based on an aggregation of what other people listened a lot to. Sure on small data sets that is probably going to be genre biased, but on large sets it can start working and break out of that.
- karmakaze 3y agoI was about to say something similar, that associating by artist is too coarse. It should be at the song (or possibly album or artist+date) level.
- jefc1111 3y agoI am like this also. It's tricky though because I think people hear 'quality' in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics, some like cultural identity, some people are probably responding at a more 'primal' level, i.e. just to the pure energy / emotion. But I do think it is different for everybody and does bear some relation to the individual's level of musical awareness and how much time and effort they invest in cultivating their own taste. I once worked with someone who when asked "What kind of music are you into?" answered "I don't really listen to music". Shocking! The best way I have found to find new stuff is just to listen to lots and lots of music, and follow different leads. It's hardy a chore doing so!
- roydivision 3y ago"I don't really listen to music" == "I don't breathe much". Way back I had friends over, one of them was looking through my CD collection which was minimal at the time, maybe 60 CDs. "Wow, you have a lot of CDs, do you listen to all of them?"
- krylon 3y agoIt works in that on my two tests, most of the artists that came up are known to me and very often present in my music library. I was kind of hoping to find stylistically similar music, but on second thought that would probably exponentially harder. That being said, what the site says it does, it does well! <3
- Marazan 3y agoPretty much every music recommendation service tells me that Turin Brakes are almost identical to Gomez and I, having ears, can tell they are not. I'd love to know how they have come to this conclusions. Is it because there aren't many Gomez lovers in the dataset and the few that are also happen to like Turin Brakes thus skewing the recommendation?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anyeung 3y agoHow do y'all define 'similar music' anyway. I haven't found the perfect playlist creator or music recommender. Spotify's radio has a pretty low hit rate for me. In some ways, I think there's a market for a multidimensional music similarity search tool or classifier (where playlists are basically classifications). A few examples. I have a 'rock concert' playlist that maps on style, artist, era/decade, but not tempo (since rock concerts sometimes break up intense songs with less intense ones) and a 'slow lounge' playlist that maps onto instruments, average tempo, tempo variance within song, etc. What I really want is a way to assign a feel or purpose across a few axes which are not just the typical 'genre'. Something actually objectively measurable like tempo, volume, etc. Edit: As a side note, I found that country (like Alan Jackson) seems to work better in the car than some other song types. I think it might actually be a frequency thing where country is Darwinism optimized to be audible and enjoyable in old trucks?
- iddan 3y agoThis works really well. Don’t love the force graph animation. I think UI of pages that you can go in and out is much better for this use case
- gcr 3y agoThis feels like the similarity isn't in terms of how the music sounds, it's similarity in terms of the social circles that the artists hang out in. Example: all the indie video game artists are close together in this space, despite having huge breadth in their music styles.
- CSMastermind 3y agoFeels like it should be based on song not artist. Sometimes an artist will have a single song that I like and want to find more music like but can't.
- alpineidyll3 3y agoI've tried about 40 of these. This one is honestly very good! I love the coverage of artists I've never even heard of. Cheers!