Show HN: SongBranch – An interactive song lyric visualization experiment | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SongBranch – An interactive song lyric visualization experiment

songbranch.com

30 pointsjojohack38 comments

Hah, I did something similar around ~2007 when I was at Last.fm and never got around to publishing it. Nice work!

This is the only example I can find lying around in my backups: http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png

Thanks, jonty. I like your layout choice, makes it more readable. What do the colors and arrow tips represent?

> What do the colors and arrow tips represent?

Dunno about the arrow tips, but seems like the slowly changing colors enable you to quite easily follow the original order of the lyrics. (except if the reader is color blind)

I thought it was this at the beginning. Like the color maze near 3/4 through this page https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/

I actually had a version using force-directed layout very similar to yours, took me a while to decide on this version!

Each colour is a verse, fading through the spectrum.

An unfilled arrowhead shows a transition between words in a line of a verse, a filled arrowhead shows a transition between lines.

That's a pretty neat approach, maybe I should do something similar. Originally I color-coded the words (based on frequency) but having a gradual spectrum applied to the edges feels a lot more intuitive.

For those that are interested, I'm basically using lyrics-fetcher to conduct the song searches (via http://makeitpersonal.co) and Springy for the core visualization.

Daft Punk's "Technologic" is entertaining:

https://i.imgur.com/JKxZ8zC.png

Nice work! Wish it had sharable URLs for specific songs.

Love it :) The share buttons actually use the current page you are on, but I can see how it would be much more useful to just update the URL based on the search pattern.

Until I fix that, here's an example of how to deep link to a particular search:

http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=tech...

Ah, thanks! I missed the share button. I shared a screenshot (with credit) to r/DaftPunk which got a kick out of it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/4b4l3m/technologi...

That's fun, I did KC and the Sunshine Band "Shake your booty"

http://i.imgur.com/ia6RNHK.png

mainly just to see how many arrows would go to the word "shake"

Eminem's songs can be used to stress-test the visualization

They certainly can: http://songbranch.com/?artistName=eminem&songTitle=the%20rea...

Excellent example of a stress test - of course it's people on HN who would think of doing something like this. I wonder if the whole genre of rap and hip hop is particularly difficult to process, due to the sheer number of words in each song.

Thanks for stress testing! I made a fix this morning to reduce the graph spazziness :)

This is cool. Thanks for sharing. I tried a long song with a lot of unique lines and the detailed view is a jumbled mess that won't stop erratically moving. See Redemption's Sapphire for an example.

Haha yup - maybe not so great for epic ballads :)

yeah, try Lou Reed's Street Hassle ... ;-)

Thanks for stress testing, I made a fix this morning to reduce the spazziness :)

Very interesting, played around a number of songs, though it seems to wig out badly on "Born Slippy":

http://songbranch.com/?artistName=underworld&songTitle=born+...

Reminds me of infinite jukebox for endlessly playing a song without it becoming too tedious from repetition http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html

Nice idea (BTW: how does it cut text into sequences of words) abut the search is crappy (I tried a few times, no results). Maybe a single search (for both author and title) with references as you type? It would be really, really helpful.

Good suggestion, I had thought of having a single field earlier (delimiting artist and title with a '-') but I thought that most users might find it cumbersome.

To generate the final graph, I started by more or less splitting the entire song into a list of words, then iteratively rejoining fragments in an order based on frequency of occurrence.

Actually I meant without having to write it all (especially as artists have a few names, e.g. with different initials). So e.g. after writing "Rammstein" I would be getting "Rammstein - Sonne", "Rammstein - Amerika" etc.

So, something Google-like rather than SQL-query-like.

Oh do you mean auto-complete? Not that easy to support since I'm relying on a remote server for song lyric searches

I see. So in that case it would be great to have a predefined list of good (and well-know) examples.

Where does the lyrics data come from? I've looked into lyrics datasets before for side projects, but copyright seems to be crippling everyone's attempts at providing them.

Agreed, I've had similar difficulty. I ended up using http://makeitpersonal.co since it appeared to have decent coverage of most of the songs I searched on.

I used Lyric Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyricWiki) to look at song lyrics by parts of speech (http://colorsong.herokuapp.com/) it works pretty well.

Love it.

Really awesome work, something cool (but I have no idea how feasable) would be listening to the song while you jump around. Other than that awesome work

Great suggestion, I had originally wanted to create something like that, but I figure folks can just open up a separate YouTube window for that. Would also love to have the timing be in sync (ala Karaoke) but I'm not aware of any open database that stores that kind of metadata.

I believe MusixMatch has timing data (it's what the Shazam karaoke mode uses), however I'm unsure if the free API allows access to it. Worth a look though. https://developer.musixmatch.com

Thanks jonty, looks like a fine resource, though it's a bit expensive to use ($25000)

This is amazing! Well done. Blues flows beautifully. My colleague wanted to know if this uses d3.js?

I used Springy.JS ( http://getspringy.com/ ) It's a pretty awesome library.

Nice job, Bob Dylan's songs are fun to watch on this

Thanks! I'm a HUGE Bob Dylan fan, incidentally :)

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