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Comment by proper_black

11 days ago

I’ve been exploring graph theory and built Overtone, an interactive graph that maps musical artists, genres, albums, labels, instruments, and their relationships using MusicBrainz data. This spun out of a separate graph-based fraud-detection project that I hope to introduce on HN sometime soon.

It’s a beta, but already works well on desktop and makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph.

Here's the link in case you wanna find some new music to listen to, or look at the artists you know and love in a different light - https://overtone.kernelpanic.lol

Feedback welcome — especially on UI/UX and scalability limits.

Hi, nice work, its pretty simple and easy to use. I've often found new artists from one-off song collaborations eg Devonte Hynes from Solange's single Losing You. No connection between them is indicated from my minimal use of the site. But that's from the data feed (MusicBrainz) from what I gather, and adding such functionality may increase complexity. Would love to get a quick playlist from all the nodes in a neighbourhood so I could listen quickly. Keen to see where it goes.

  • Hi there! Thank you :D I just looked up both Devonte Hynes and Solange and put them on the same graph. They indeed seem to be disconnected, but I also couldn't find the single you mentioned at all, so yeah, it's probably just absent from the DB. If you ever find the time and motivation to add it to MusicBrainz, it will show up in time on my copy, though :) I haven't yet, but plan on scheduling replication weekly or so, so that the graph can evolve along with the data. Thanks again and be sure to send any feedback you might have in the future my way!

    EDIT: Oh, and I definitely want to make playlists a part of it, haven't figured out the best way yet. The dream would be to use something like Bandcamp and actively encourage people to give money directly to the artists, but it might not be the most straight-forward way to do it. Stay tuned though, playlists will be there in the future

I didn't have a ton of time to play with this but on first try this is awesome. Looking forward to spending more time playing with it

  • Thanks for the kind comment! :D Hope you get some more time soon! Be sure to play around with expanding stuff, adding the subgraphs of two random artists and seeing how they intersect and check it out once a week or so, as I'm actively making changes over there. Any and all feedback is appreciated if anything comes up :)