Timewasters!
Can’t remember if I’ve linked this before, but Glenn McDonald, of the sadly-defunct music blog The War Against Silence, made an online interactive scatter-graph that attempts to plot out the relative positions of hundreds (thousands?) of musical genres and sub-genres, complete with sub-scatter graphs of artists that may be considered part of that genre (and, musical samples of each).
Click on the genre name to hear a sample of the genre; click on the arrow to the right of the genre name, to see artists within it; click on an artist name to hear a sample; click on the arrow to the right of the artist name to go to the artist page on Spotify for more.
The classical music (broadly defined) region strikes me mystifying. It doesn’t help that it seems a bit unclear about the difference between a composer and a performer. It reminds me a bit of trying to use Pandora for classical music, where the algorithm may or may not work for popular music, but for classical the results are simply incoherent.Report
They certainly are.Report
The makers also appear to be having us on once in a while. For example, Guided by Voices appears under “lo-fi” (so far so good), BUT also appear under “gbvfi” – it’s possible that GbV are influential and prolific enough, that they warrant their own genre, but…
There’s also one called “Deep Indie Rock”, and I have never heard of ANY of them; I mean not one.
Admittedly, I’m old and stuff, but come ON…some of these HAVE to be made up.
Still, it’s a fun toy, and I’d wager that picking something you like in the pop/rock/dance/etc. spaces, and then checking out the proximate artists there, would probably net you a few finds.Report
Oh, I think I’ve actually posted some Boy Eats Drum Machine here!
I’m young. I’m young!
(I couldn’t find anyone else on the “Deep Indie Rock” list that I’d heard of.)
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My first thought was “reminds me of Menomena”; and lo and behold, Menomena drummer Danny Seim (also of Portland) apparently is used on the album (not sure if that’s him on that track?). Just ordered a used copy of the Booomboxx CD.
https://youtu.be/5BXr_4g0o9MReport
Oh, it clearly works much better for pop/rock. And that is fine. I am mostly commenting on how people come up with these music algorithms and they conclude that because it works well for both rockabilly and grunge, it clearly is universally awesome. In particular, classical music has enough residual cultural prestige that they want to imagine their awesome algorithm works for classical, too. But they aren’t actually interested in classical, and there is no money in it, so no one puts in the effort to come up with an algorithm that actually works for classical.
That is fine. You know what works for me? Radio stations. I am fortunate to have a very good local classical station, and there are many others that stream online. I will pull up a station from, say, Hong Kong to hear what they play. Life is good.
But stuff like this is almost comical. I punched in Perotin. He is an interesting test case because he wrote around 1200, and is among the earliest composers where we can actually play it and ascribe it to this guy. It is so early that a lot of Western music ideas of harmony and melody had not yet gelled, and so he doesn’t really sound like what we think of as Western music. So what did this site do with him? It’s reaction was “fuck it: toss him in with everyone else from before 1600 or so” as if nothing had changed over the previous four hundred years.
As another test I put in John Philip Sousa. It classified him as classical, romantic, and marching band. Going into romantic, he is near Vivaldi, which is weird. Sousa you can put in romantic based on his dates, but under no scheme is Vivaldi plausibly romantic. Going into marching bands, he is in the middle of a bunch of marching bands: Marine Corps Band, various college bands, and so forth: sensible so far as it goes, but not actually useful if I was wondering about other composers to marches.
Then I put in Stephen Foster. The site has never heard of him. That is just pathetic. That’s when I quite testing it.Report
(Now Glyph’s young too!)
I wonder if, with classical music, it’s the algorithm or the input. I don’t know exactly how their algorithm works, but I’m assuming that with their Genome project attributes, they have a big multi-dimensional space and similarity scores based on proximity. If that’s the case, it’s likely the attributes, that is the dimensions, that are the problem, either because the 400 or whatever attributes they use don’t apply as well to classical music, or because the people who applied them don’t understand classical music well enough to assign them to pieces accurately.
I’ve always noticed that with both jazz and classical, Pandora stations are basically just “any classical” or “any jazz” (though it does seem to make some really broad jazz distinctions).Report
Well, I don’t know if this helps, but down at the bottom of the page there’s a link to how it’s doing what it’s doing:
http://blog.echonest.com/post/52385283599/how-we-understand-music-genresReport
If I had found this using it (instead of on Dangerous Minds just now), it would automatically become the GREATEST orchestral app ever:
https://youtu.be/8Y8e2ZlNFaAReport
It doesn’t have “The Other Ones”. FAIL!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Ones_(Australian-German_band)Report
But it DOES have The Only Ones, as well as The Other Two!Report
Yeaaahhh, but it doesn’t have That 1 Guy!Report
But it DOES have A Guy Called Gerald!Report