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Music-Map – Find Similar Music

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Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why "quality" radio can be so powerful: it's not uncommon for DJs to curate a set based on "songs with the same musician" or "original song and remakes/samples from the original" and the like. Not that it's guaranteed to be "good" stuff but at least unique and more memorable in my experience

Any recommendations? I listen to BBC 6 Music a lot. Tried various others but nothing really 'stuck'. Always fun to have a fly around on https://radio.garden also. KEXP have some great performances on youtube, I should try listening to the radio station probably. Although saying that, neither 6 Music or KEXP (or others I have tried) seem to go quite obscure enough for me. i like pop / rock / indie but also experimenta…

BBC 6 Music is a great example of what I'm talking about, they have such excellent taste. I've discovered so much great music listening to them.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#83
How 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?

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why "quality" radio can be so powerful: it's not uncommon for DJs to curate a set based on "songs with the same musician" or "original song and remakes/samples from the original" and the like. Not that it's guaranteed to be "good" stuff but at least unique and more memorable in my experience

Any recommendations? I listen to BBC 6 Music a lot. Tried various others but nothing really 'stuck'. Always fun to have a fly around on https://radio.garden also. KEXP have some great performances on youtube, I should try listening to the radio station probably. Although saying that, neither 6 Music or KEXP (or others I have tried) seem to go quite obscure enough for me. i like pop / rock / indie but also experimenta…

Not necessarily obscure enough for you but I recommend https://radioparadise.com.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#85
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'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 t…

I dare say you might just enjoy Buddy Guy and Angelique Kidjo belting out Voodoo Chile : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN_K84TAxNs

Ahhh, that gives me goosebumps... amazing. Thank you!

Which reminds me, I really should seek out Oko Drammeh, long time friend and organizer of that festival.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#86

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…

In my personal experience I gave up on Pandora. It was regularly suggesting me music that wasn't at all similar to the song I started on. In fact it was consistently worse at finding me similar music than just plain Spotify radio (or playlist enhancer) and/or YouTube Music radio. Contrast Chosic (which is free) - its recommendations are configurable and usually hit the mark much better: https://www.chosic.com/playlis…

> plain Spotify radio

To be very fair, there's nothing plain whatsoever about Spotify's recommendations. Not only do they have the largest corpus of training data, their models are hard to beat.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#87

I 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…

Yeah, a bare minimum for this is probably to give at _least_ two songs and not just one. What is "good" is still subjective but given a few more data points and the gist of those enjoying all those should also be able to better provide what else these users enjoy.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience I gave up on Pandora. It was regularly suggesting me music that wasn't at all similar to the song I started on. In fact it was consistently worse at finding me similar music than just plain Spotify radio (or playlist enhancer) and/or YouTube Music radio. Contrast Chosic (which is free) - its recommendations are configurable and usually hit the mark much better: https://www.chosic.com/playlis…

> plain Spotify radio To be very fair, there's nothing plain whatsoever about Spotify's recommendations. Not only do they have the largest corpus of training data, their models are hard to beat.

If only they suggested more than the same three or five songs by bands.

Re: Music-Map – Find Similar Music

#90
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…

That makes sense. I threw in my favorite (used to be underground) artist and saw every side-project they had pop up (and they have around a dozen). OTOH, I just threw in Nujabes and saw a number of people I do not recognize, which I find interesting.

From my tests, the suggestions make sense. It seems to be better than the spotify "I will play things that send you into an echo chamber" algorithm.

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