A Website You CAN NOT MISS: Every Noise At Once
The futility of trying to get a handle on modern music is a self-evident, especially when you include world music. It is a genre mystifying you and the horse you rode in on of modern sounds. You just get into Nigerian Afrobeats meets Dancehall and you’re off to the Ugandan popster Spice Diana and next thing you know you are up to your neck in in something new, where Wilco’s six hour plus of Summerteeth Deluxe beckons.
rock nyc essentially only covers pop, by pop we mean everything from black metal to indie folk, to emorap but still, pop, and it eats up all our time which is why we are less playful than we were on 2010. By the time I’ve finished new album releases it is Thursday afternoon and hours away from more…
A couple of years ago I was thinking of a website to detail all new releases (no time, no money, that’s why not), and released today I’d been beaten to the punch by Every Noise At Once (here):
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 5,030 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2020-11-06. 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.
Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.
Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust.
A Retromatic History of Music (or Love) follows these genres across years.
Spotify New Releases by Genre uses them to scour this week’s new releases.
We Built This City On follows them to their cities of origin.
Genres by Country breaks them down by strength of association with countries.
Songs From the Edges flings you through a blast-tour of the most passionate genrecults.
Songs From the Ages samples demographic groups.
Songs From the Streets samples cities.
Drunkard’s Rock wanders around for a really long time.
The Sounds of Places plots countries as if they were genres.
Spotify World Browser shows Spotify editorial programming in different countries.
Every Place at Once is an index of the distinctive listening of individual cities.
Hyperspace House Concerts looks for music playing only in particular places.
Every School at Once is an index of the distinctive listening of students by school.
Genres in Their Own Words maps genres to words found in their song titles.
The Needle tries to find songs surging towards the edges of one obscurity or another.
2019 Around the World surrounds and inhabits a year in music.
The Approaching Worms of Christmas tries to wrap itself around things I usually fight.
The Aqueduct of Youth brings you kids’ music so you can listen young.
Every Demographic at Once further explores listening by country, age and gender.
Or there’s a dynamically-generated daily summary of Spotify Listening Patterns by Gender.You can also scan genres and many other things with Discover Quickly.According to C/Net (here):”Every Noise At Once is the work of Glenn McDonald of The Echo Nest, a music data company recently acquired by Spotify. On the site, you’ll find more than 1,200 musical genres plotted across the page in a seemingly random arrangement.At the bottom of the page, the organization of the genres is explained: “Down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.”
Click on any of the genres to hear a 30-second sample via Spotify, and hover your cursor over a genre to see artist and track information of the sample. Click the double arrows that appear to the right of a genre when you click on it or hover over it to open a new page with representative bands of that genre. From this page, you can click on a band for a 30-second sample of its sound or click the double arrows to go to that band’s page on Spotify.”
