At some stage, unless you’re the type who keeps up to speed with the music ‘the kids’ listen to these days, somebody is going to mention a genre you’ve never heard of.

I feel most out of touch when it comes to trance and house music.

‘Ja, no, hey, I’m just more into dark minimal trance ‘coz I feel like the deep progressive house scene has become more commercial, hey.’

They’re all words I vaguely understand, but put them together and I’m out of my depth.

Enter Every Noise At Once, which is a pretty stellar effort to visually map all of the world’s musical genres algorithmically, by making use of Spotify data.

For a brief summary, here’s an article from last year on The Outline:

Through the miracle of computer programming, the collective artistic genius and work of diverse individuals and cultures is flattened out into a single sprawling word cloud, with rock genres cluttering in the center, and other more remote musics pulsing off in seemingly stochastic drifts.

Some might view it as a sign of impending doom, I suppose. But you could also see it as beautiful, fractal representation of the joys to be had in crossing cultures and musical styles; a vision of a world with the walls taken out.

Clearly, the ‘shrooms just kicked in, but he makes a good point.

Head to the site, and you’ll be greeted by a screen that looks like this:

Now I struggle with genres at the best of times, but what the hell is ‘cosmic uplifting trance’, as we can see in the bottom left of that image above?

Easy – click the words and a portion of a song that falls into that genre will play. Go on, click around to your heart’s content.

When we say every single genre, we are not lying. Another screenshot, for those with very good eyesight:

Don’t be afraid to scroll, and scroll, and scroll – the genres keep on coming.

Right down the bottom of the page, I reached the choir section, and clicked on ‘Australian choir’:

Just like a regular choir, but with an annoying little twang, I suppose.

You can even select a specific genre, and have the artists that make up that genre laid out for you.

I clicked ‘classic rock’ so that your dad can understand what the hell is going on:

You may recognise some of these as the artists every drunk uncle requests at a wedding.

I suggest you take a few moments to dig around Every Noise At Once yourself, and get lost down the wormhole.

[source:theoutline]