Music Machinery

Update – You are probably looking for this web-based version of Boil The Frog and the blog post about it.

The rest of this article is about the unreleased Spotify Version of Boil the Frog.

I’m at Music Apps Hack Weekend doing my favorite thing: hacking on music. I’ve just finished my hack called Boil the Frog.  Boil the Frog  is a Spotify App that will create playlists that gradually take you from one music style to another.  It is like the proverbial story of the frog in the pot of water. If you heat the water gradually, the frog won’t notice and will happily sit in the pot until it becomes frog stew.  With Boil the Frog  you can do the same thing musically.  Create a playlist that gradually takes your pre-teen from Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis, or perhaps more perversely the Kenny G fan to Cannibal Corpse.

To build the app I built an artist similarity graph of 100,000 of the most popular artists. I use The Echo Nest artist similarity to connect each artist to its four nearest neighbors. To find the path between any two artists I use a bidirectional Dijkstra shortest path algorithm.  Most paths can be computed in less than 100ms.

The Spotify Apps API is the perfect hacking platform. You can build a Spotify app that has full access to the vast Spotify music catalog and artwork, along with access to the listener’s catalog.   Since the Spotify Apps run in an embedded browser all of your web app programming skills apply.  You can use jQuery, make calls to JSON APIs, use HTML 5 canvas. It is all there. Spotify has done a really good job putting together this platform.  The only downside is that, unlike the web, it is hard to actually release Spotify apps, but the Spotify team is working to make this easier.    I’d love to release Boil the Frog because it is really fun to make playlists that bring you from one music style to another. It is interesting to see what musical neighborhoods you wander through on your way.  For instance, I made a Kenny G to Cannibal Corpse playlist. To get there, the playlist brought me from easy listening, to movie soundtracks and then through video game soundtracks to get to the heavy metal world.  Cool stuff.  If you want to see a playlist between two artists let me  know in the comments and I’ll create and share the playlist with you.

I made a video of Boil the Frog in action.   Check it out:

[youtube http://youtu.be/Nj6JAxm9aPE]

Update: I’ve just pushed the client code out to github:  https://github.com/plamere/boilthefrog