New Website Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help You Find New Music
Are you on the hunt for awesome music you’ve never heard before? Of course you are! For one thing, you’re reading this website. For another thing, everyone is. So. Yeah.
Enter Sunny Singh, a.k.a. hate5six, a.k.a. the dude who captured this week’s wonderful video illustrating why you shouldn’t bring a beer into the pit. Singh has now launched a new website, Sage, which uses artificial intelligence to recommend bands to users.
Basically, the way it works is this: you enter as many bands you love as you like, and as many bands you hate as you like. Then you click a search button and voilà! Recommendations galore, arranged by the percentage you will supposedly enjoy them. And if you already know a band you can add them to the love list or the hate list and do another search without having to enter every band all over again (you can also remove bands from either list, natch).
As for how it actually works (i.e., the tech stuff), well, I’m dumb about that kind of thing… but there’s a very long, very detailed explanation here. But here’s the extremely condensed version:
“We’ve been able to leverage publicly available data about communal listening habits across over 200,000 bands and developed a novel model for finding new music. The model has been able to learn fairly robust mathematical representations of bands that preserves their ‘context’: bands that share members, have similar tempos, are lyrically and thematically related, tend to cluster together in the embedded space. This enables the user to define taste profiles capturing what they do and don’t like, and that corresponds to a well-defined set of mathematical operations on the embedded representations of bands.”
As far as I can tell from futzing around with Sage for fifteen minutes, its recommendations are pretty spot-on. For example, if I pretend to be, say, your average Five Finger Death Punch fan, I get these results:
See? Pretty much perfect!
Alas, it has yet to recommend a band I don’t already know. But I’m The Most Important Person in Metal; you lowly plebes may get better results.
Play with Sage here.
[via]
