Live data from Hacker News

Music-Map – Find Similar Music

music-map.com

31–40 of 117 posts

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#31
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…

Hilariously 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

WL - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9jeJk2UHQ

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#32

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?

If 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#33

I’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 a…

[deleted]

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#34
Throughout 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, which is kinda like Goodreads but for music.

Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#35
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…

That'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-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 ...

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#36

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).

Hm... 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#37
This 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#38
First 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.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#39
post #37

This 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.

I can see a 'programmers fallacies about artist names' article soon.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#40

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, that's a good point. For instance 'We do what we can' by Sheryl Crow is one of those. It stands out so much for me that I find it hard to recognize it as her work compared to the other tracks.
Post reply on HN