Ever wonder what Spanish invasion, crack rock steady or even technical death metal sounded like?
Ever heard of these genres at all? Glenn McDonald genre taxonomist at Spotify, is the brain behind Every Noise At Once a site containing an ongoing project to map of every music genre you could think of in one place. Based on data for over 1300 genres in The Echo Nest databases, the map is an “algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space”. Its general rule of thumb for navigation is that “down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.”
You can even listen to a thirty second clip of each genre by clicking on the word itself and find out example artists of that genre too. Further still, the site allows you to interrogate the map even further by arranging it in a number of ways, most interestingly looking at the genres in a historical context and also grouping them by location. So from deep disco to deep discofox, or Armenian folk to Norwegian gospel Every Noise At Once could certainly prove to be a significantly informative tool.
