If you are like me and lost with all these different music styles, this project is for you,… and me. Every Noise at Once is an interactive project which lets you navigate among these hundreds and hundreds of music genres. Scroll around the page and you will find what you are looking for, from ‘baroque ensemble’, to ‘pop gaze’, from Arab folk’, to ‘French punk’ and ‘Ukrainian rock’, from ‘filter house’ to ‘new rave’, you name it, all the most obscure genres are there, somewhere in an endless series of clouds of names. But the beauty of this page is that it lets you click on any genre and listen to the chosen music style. Plus if you click on the double arrow following the name, another map opens, presenting all the artists and bands representing the genre, then, if you click on any of these artists, you will be able to listen to some sample of their work, while a click on the double arrow will open the Spotify page of the said artist… wow, this is actually amazing and I could spend hours and hours exploring the page… But my question is…. Is everybody there? Considering every single band that exists and has existed looks like a gigantic and impossible task.
Project creator and ‘genre taxonomist’ Glenn McDonald explained on Twitter:
‘[Every Noise at Once] is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1374 genres by The Echo Nest. 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.’
It looks awesome already and this should be a reference for every music lover. However some bands are very difficult to classify in one unique genre… I did a research for the Mavericks, a band I just saw this week and which seems to be a bit all over the place, and my research returned the following list: outlaw country, texas country, country christmas, country, country rock, traditional country, nashville sound, contemporary country, which means they actually attribute several genres to some artists, I just wonder why there is no Latin/rockabilly tags? Another hard-to-classify band like The Afghan Whigs? alternative rock, permanent wave, alternative pop, grunge, lo-fi… Weezer? permanent wave, alternative rock, punk christmas, power pop, indie christmas, pop christmas, rock… funny all these Christmas tags, right? Nick Cave? just melancholia!! A tag he shares with Cat Power, although she has many more of them: melancholia, indie christmas, chamber pop, slow core, anti-folk, indie rock, freak folk, indie folk, indie pop, folk-pop, lo-fi, singer-songwriter, stomp and holler…. I could go on forever, but it is only a work in progress.