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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

Audio samples of 1500+ musical genres

Every Sound At Once

Warning: you might lose an entire hour to this… Every Noise at Once is a one-page map of playable audio samples for more than 1500 musical genres, from deep tech house to Finnish metal to smooth jazz to geek folk to klezmer to deep opera.

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

You can also listen to a playlist of one song from each musical genre on Spotify (1536 songs that play for 110 hours & 35 minutes):

Or slice and dice genres list in various ways to get to genre specific playlists.

Update: I’ve been informed that if you hover over the name of a genre and then click on the “»”, you get a map of artists in that genre, each with a playable sample. Oops, there goes MY ENTIRE DAY.