There are many things that allow us to appreciate the variety of tastes developed by human beings, but music is without a doubt a special case. Language, region, religion, era, politics, technology, and a long list of factors modified music again and again, leading to thousands of different genres. The Every Sound At Once project seeks to classify them all, with samples included.
If I mention, for example, the song Maybe that many knew through the game Fallout, our minds think “classic,” “retro,” “oldie,” or simply “blues,” but at the time, that song was technically pop. Which is curious, because more than one person places the beginnings of pop in the mid-’50s, as a derivative of rock and roll. By the way, it’s more likely to discover cold fusion than to find the true origin of rock and roll, because according to experts it took elements from blues, jazz, swing, boogie woogie, and even gospel music.
Where does it begin? Where does it end? If music sounds all the same these days, it’s due to constant commercial manipulation, but anyone can quickly get lost trying to establish origins or draw conclusions. Even defining the limits of each genre is complicated, something that The Echo Nest, an old MIT Media Lab project bought by Spotify the previous year, partially attempted. The Echo Nest tried to understand the acoustic and textual content of recorded music, registering more than 1,300 genres along the way. The Every Sound at Once page lets you listen to all of them.
The adventure begins with a simple click on a genre. Let’s see: Synthpop… “Remedy” by Little Boots. Hm, that was too easy. Another click on the arrow next to the genre name will take us to a list of associated artists. Under the Synthpop umbrella, we find Rick Astley rubbing elbows with Depeche Mode and INXS. Also appearing are Erasure, A-Ha, and The Human League… (the ’80s are back and want revenge), but the site introduces to the genre things like MGMT (?) and Florence + The Machine (??). The page gives us a general idea of how artists are positioned: down is more organic, up is more electric and mechanical, to the left is denser, and to the right is with beats, bounces, and jumps. The algorithm has a lot of work ahead, but it’s fine-tuning its aim.
Finally, one more click on the arrow next to the artist’s name sends us to their page within Spotify, and if we have an account there, we can listen to their music for free. Every Sound At Once is a project that at first glance may seem simple, but in reality we are facing a true chimera. Classifying music by genre and placing a sample online is titanic, and therefore it deserves to be appreciated.
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