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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

All The Noises

Are you tired of attempting to categorize songs into some type of genre? Are you sick of attempting to determine whether a song is pop, rock, country, country pop, pop rock, indie pop, indie rock, or possibly something that has the word 'metal', 'house' or 'punk' in it?

I'm not sure how exactly you're going to take today's link.

There's a man named Glenn McDonald at the site Echo Nest. What he's done is create a scatter plot of 1,251 different musical genres. Each genre is clickable, presenting you with a sample song (hover over it with the mouse to find out what song that is), and from there, you'll see similar genres nearby. He has called this plot Every Noise At Once. Click the arrows that show up next to a genre's name, and you'll see another plot of artists grouped under that heading.

Then he went and did other things with it, such as show what cities are prevalent in producing. For instance, London is responsible for 28.3% of the genre labeled 'talent show', because it appears to encompass X-Factor alumni, including One Direction, and that's largely based in London.

Then there's a second genre called 'more talent show', which appears to cover alumni from The Voice, and a third called 'idol', which, well, you should be able to guess that one and probably recognize a lot of names on the plot.

I'll be hunkered over this thing for a long time now, if you don't mind.

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