
A screenshot from Every Noise at Once
Every Noise at Once
If you’ve ever wondered what is meant by the terms space rock, chiptune or moombahton, a new web app developed by coder Glenn MacDonald will provide an interactive genre guide. Every Noise at Once, controlled by algorithms, is a bubble chart of musical genres. Click on a genre, and you will hear excerpt of music, as well as another bubble chart of associated bands. The site also has a ‘scan’ mode, in which it cycles endlessly through short clips of assigned musical genres.
There are also roughly-defined axes at play in the site, says its creator. ‘Left is more electric and right is more acoustic,’ says MacDonald. ‘And even more roughly speaking, up is more sonic density or uniformity, down is more sonic spareness or spikiness. The less data, the looser the correlations, so the artist distribution within a genre tends to be necessarily less precisely data-related than the distribution of genres.’