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Music-Map – Find Similar Music

music-map.com

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#22

Back 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=sfl... I wish other music apps could license their recom…

Yes, 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).

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#23
Project by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mg

All manually user-generated by people contributing 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#24

My 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 :/

There are bands that change their sound so much from one song/album to the next that this is sure to be hit and miss for a lot of artists.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#25
Wow! 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#26
post #21

My 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 :/

Yes. Somgs-like-this-song is the thing I wanna find.

I 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#28
post #25

Wow! 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 S…

I also looked into more obsure bands I'm into. I suspect the relatedness is affected by the band lineups of previous tours

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#30

Does 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?

Oh thanks below for explanation that it's surprisingly user generated/submitted! kinda crazy, but ok.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482492

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