Music Machinery

There’s no hackathon this weekend, but that’s no excuse not to write some code.   I’ve been wanting to experiment with amcharts, a Javascript charting package so I wrote a web app that shows lots of charts and graphs for artists.  The app is ArtistX.  It is an artist explorer that lets you look at all of the Echo Nest song parameters for any artist. For instance, you can look at the Energy Distribution of songs by Weezer:

Energy Distribution of Songs By Weezer

You can look at the tempo distribution of songs by The Rolling Stones:

Tempo Distribution for the Rolling Stones

Or you can look at scatter plots that show 4 attributes at once (X, Y, size and color). Here’s a plot of all of Muse’s songs showing the energy, loudness, hotttnesss and liveness:

Scatter plot for Muse

You can interact with the plots – click on a bar or point in a plot to listen to songs (via Rdio).

The app lets you explore across 11 different song parameters: energy, loudness, danceability, liveness, speechiness, hotttnesss, tempo, duration, key, time signature and mode.  You can use the app to find all sorts of interesting things. Want to listen all the stage patter for an artist?  Create scatter plot for the artist with liveness and speechiness as the X, Y parameters. The songs in the upper right-hand corner of the plot will be the ones you are looking for. Try it with an artist like Elvis Presley or Dean Martin.

Give the app a spin here:  ArtistX.  The source is at github/echonest/ArtistX