A clock where the time is in a song title | Hacker News Reader

A clock where the time is in a song title

pudding.cool

67 pointsCharlesW47 comments

It's close, but 3:33, 5:00, and 4:20 are the most popular. Every time is represented, but 6:31AM, 8:41AM, and 9:49AM have only one song.

Entire list: https://pudding.cool/projects/clocks/assets/songs.csv

How would one compile such a list?

Do api calls to something like Apple Music or Spotify with “HH:mm” as the search string. Scrape the results. Do some more filtering on the results.

Ah so those APIs allow searching lyrics? I did not know that.

It's searching titles, not lyrics.

I see. Thanks.

No need for API calls. MusicBrainz has a very complete dataset. All Creative Commons.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Download

The list seems to be slapping PM and AM together. So you could get a song about 10:02 PM at 10:02 AM, and probably the reverse.

Seems strange they would not use a 24 hour clock to associate the songs, and the songs not specifically being about before or after noon could be associated with both.

Indeed, it would feel weird to play 2 Minutes to Midnight two minutes before noon.

Ones I can predict based on my music knowledge:

2112 by Rush (interpreted in this case as a timestamp rather than a year)

25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago (get 2 whole mins for this one)

2 Minutes to Midnight by Iron Maiden

12:30, the Mamas and the Papas

"Five O'Clock World" by The Vogues

10:35 by Tiesto

"9 to 5" by Dolly Parton? (You could make it work as 9:25 and/or 4:51)

5:19 by Realto

Came here to check if they have 2 Minutes to Midnight, but alas, no [1].

[1] https://pudding.cool/projects/clocks/assets/songs.csv

> 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago (get 2 whole mins for this one)

Three, if you misinterpret it as I did..

3:35 3:34 3:54

My first thought here is: Damn, there is -so much- content out there. Not necessarily art or culture, just ... content.

Looking forward to, say, a TV show where every line of dialogue is the title of another TV show (you could actually produce this reasonably easily with AI, and it would be, I suppose, a neat publicity stunt; but I hope to God I haven't given anyone an idea).

There's been more good entertainment out there for anyone to meaningfully get through in their lives for a long while now.

Feels kinda sad knowing that I'll likely never come across what would be my favourite song/movie/TV show. At least there's always something new to discover though.

I'd be very curious to see a histogram showing which times have the most/least songs written about them.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate that 4:20 is at the top of the list. At least among times that don't end in :00 or :30.

Surprisingly it's number 3. Beat by 5:00 and 3:33. I have no idea what the significance of those are. I mean I guess 5:00 is the traditional start of evening, but no idea what's special about 3:33.

If your track is already three-and-a-half-ish minutes long maybe the mastering engineer says "okay let's add a couple seconds at the end to make it exactly 3:33 for fun"

One of the oldest questions on the SciFi stackexchange, trying to find a story where twice a day at 3:33 the numbers on a clock would come to life: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2937/story-where-t...

Though it was misremembered and it was actually 5, not 3, 5:55 is also near the top of this list.

From:

    curl "https://pudding.cool/projects/clocks/assets/songs.csv" | awk -F ',' '{print $1}'|uniq -c|sort -n

BTW if you want the full histogram use this:

    curl "https://pudding.cool/projects/clocks/assets/songs.csv" | awk -F ',' '{print $1}'|uniq -c|sort -n |awk '{printf("%5s: %s\n", $2, sprintf("%0" $1 "s", ""));}'

There’s a couple good bash libraries for that too: https://github.com/glamp/bashplotlib

There’s a better one google is failing me on

Can’t wait for 12:51 (The Strokes)

What about "Sunrise" by Pulp

10:15 on a Saturday night from the cure. And the tap drips drips drips

This is the correct time.

I guess we won't be making it to 25 o'clock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGF7o_I4mAw

I suppose we might make it to 25 or 6 to 4, though (which, venerable online articles once informed me, refers to 3:34-3:35 am).

Be waiting all day for 5:15

Shucks. 3:12 by Suisei (prod. Taku Inoue), one of my favorite songs, isn't on there. That's probably because it uses the Japanese format of 3時12分. Worth a listen: https://youtu.be/LYFciXBcXIQ?si=Kq94sqYWv-qCkwUV

Are there any holes in this coverage? Any of the 1440 minutes of the day that don't have their own song?

I once built a little clock display which displayed "A LITTLE AFTER THREE" and similar messages. I wanted to do it with an e-ink display so it would run for a year or so on battery, but settled for a plug-in version.

The idea came from an old New Yorker cartoon.