Show HN: Explore music through adjectives | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Explore music through adjectives

akin.to

30 pointsollieglass12 comments

I wrote Akin To to scratch a personal itch - I find music recommendation systems really boring. I search for John Coltrane, they all recommend Miles Davis. That's obvious and uninteresting.

I wanted to make a system that could suggest Squarepusher and Steve Reich by using the underlying themes and qualities of the music to make relevant and novel recommendations.

This thematic information already exists in music reviews, I've extracted adjectives from them and used them as a way to search, explore and compare album reviews. It kind-of works. I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

I searched for "epic", and one of the suggestions was "epic-as-fuck". I'm curious about how this phrase was selected as an adjective. What sort of rules do you use to find adjective phrases?

On a side note: is "fuck" very epic, or not very epic? I have no idea...

I'm using the part of speech tagger from Python's NLTK to find the adjectives (http://nltk.org/). Sometimes it selects phrases instead of individual words, I'm not using any extra rules to do this.

I've left the phrases in because I think they're interesting and informative. Do you agree, or do you find them distracting?

Not sure about your side note!

Given that there are individual ideas that require more than one word to express, including adjective phrases makes sense. I was actually impressed by their inclusion. I did notice a false positive though: "integrity.While"

I hadn't heard of the NLTK before. Thanks for pointing me to it!

very sweet, are you using Solr?

No, just MySQL.

This is really neat! I think it would be interesting to see how the graphs of different reviewing websites compare. did you test it with any other sites and compare recommendations?

Thanks!

Not yet, I'd love to try it with other sites and types of reviews.

This is a really nice idea. Thought about making it into a Spotify app or making an API?

I've not. A Spotify would be a nice feature.

Would you use an API?

Is there not a way to show more than 10 results? Or am I just dumb? (super awesome idea btw)

You're not being dumb, it's currently limited to the top 10 results.

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