For my Christmas vacation programming project this year, I revisited an old hack: Six Degrees of Black Sabbath. I wrote the original, way back in 2010 at the very first San Francisco Music Hack Day. That version is still up and running, and getting regular visits, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth and so I’ve given it a total rewrite from the ground up. The result is the new Six Degrees of Black Sabbath:
Six Degrees of Black Sabbath is like the Oracle of Bacon but for music. It lets you find connections to just about any two artists based upon their collaborations. Type in the name of two artists, and 6dobs will give you a pathway showing the connections that will get you from one artist to another. For instance, if you enter ‘The Beatles’ and ‘Norah Jones’ you’ll get a path like:
- We start with The Beatles
- The Beatles had member George Harrison
- George Harrison performed with Ravi Shankar on the song Bangla Dhun and 26 others.
- Ravi Shankar was parent of Norah Jones
If you don’t like a particular connection, you can bypass it generating a new path. For instance, if we bypass Ravi Shankar, it will take us eight steps to get to Norah Jones from the Beatles:
The Beatles -> Paul McCartney -> The Fireman -> Youth -> Pigface
-> Mike Dillon ->Garage A Trois -> Charlie Hunter -> Norah Jones
Not all connections are created equal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have been playing together for over 50 years in the Rolling Stones. That’s a much stronger connection than the one between Mick Jagger and Fergie for performing a single song together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We take these connection strengths into account when finding paths between artists. Preference is given to stronger connections, even if those stronger connections will yield a longer path.
The new version of Six Degrees of Black Sabbath has a number of new features:
Video – Each step in a path is represented by a Youtube video – often with a video by the two artists that represent that step. I’m quite pleased at how well the video works for establishing the connection between two artists. Youtube seems to have it all.
Live stats – The app tracks and reports all sorts of things such as the longest path discovered so far, the most frequently occurring artists on paths, the most connected artists, most searched for artists and so on.
Larger database of connections – the database has about a quarter million artists and 2.5 million artist-to-artist connections.
Autocomplete for artist names – no need to try to remember how to spell ‘Britney Spears‘ – just start typing the parts you know and it will sort it out.
Spiffier looking UI – It still looks like it was designed by an engineer, but at least it looks like it was designed in this decade by an engineer.
Path finding improvements – faster and better paths throughout.
Revisiting this app after 4 years was a lot of fun. I got to dive deep into a bunch of tech that was new to me including Redis, Bootstrap 3, and the YouTube video search API. I spent many hours untangling the various connections in the new Musicbrainz schema. I took a tour through a number of Pythonic network graph libraries (Networkx, igraph and graph-tool), I learned a lot about Python garbage collection when you have a 2.5gb heap.
Give the app a try and let me know what you think.
Music Machinery 