Show HN: Dancemusic.wtf – Quiz Game for Learning Electronic Dance Music Styles

by Tjorvens • 8 years ago

152 55 8 years ago

Tjorvens• 8 years ago

Heyoo HN. Finished this side project of mine during the weekend. Read more about it on GitHub: https://github.com/Hemmingsson/dancemusic.wtf

Let me know if you have any feedback!

sago• 8 years ago

Nice job. Here is my suggestion.

If the aim is to educate, it would be good to get a bit of feedback on the wrong answers. So if it said

"This is breakbeat, breakbeat is characterised by..."

I'm not big into EDM, so I thought it would be good to learn something, but I didn't feel like I came out any more informed.

rhcom2• 8 years ago

I agree, I found myself googling most of the answers to get an idea of what the terms even meant.

plurinshael• 8 years ago

Hey thanks for this! There are a ton of sub-genres I'm not well acquainted with so this super helps. One request I would make is to be able pause the game, so that I can see the artist and track name for longer. Thanks this is great!

rollinDyno• 8 years ago

Would be cool to have a browsing section so we could train before playing.

I was thrown off by two very different tracks being the same genre. How accurate would you call your dataset?

Also, as a techno lover I'd enjoy playing with the same 4 options (minimal, detroit, hard, etc) with only techno tracks. Even better would be being able to toggle some genres away from the game.

chrisco255• 8 years ago

Props for the UX and making it responsive on even the smallest screens! Not easy for a skeumorphic design, but you pulled it off!

moondowner2• 8 years ago

A 'Next' button maybe, e.g. a person guesses the genre in the first sample and doesn't feel like waiting.

jgh2• 8 years ago

Pretty good...Do you get less points if you take longer? I didnt really quite get how the points work. Maybe indicate that visually if that's the case.

Another thing is sometimes the clips start in a breakdown and unless you're familiar with the track it's sometimes difficult to know the genre until the drop.

oh i think i found a track that was mislabeled, but unfortunately i didnt catch the name sorry :( .. it was a track marked "Post-Dubstep" but sounded like a house track of some kind.

golergka2• 8 years ago

Aside from the dubstep comment above, as a game designer, I would advice you to make the score mechanic more transparent. Right now, I see how much score did I get only after clicking the answer, and while I suspect that the sooner I click, the higher the score, the interface never shows this link to me.

If you display the constantly decreasing "stake" on screen, it will immediately explain the mechanic to the player and put more pressure on him to make the choice quicker, making the choice between clicking right now and spending additional time thinking over his choice more interesting.

volkk• 8 years ago

I dig the gsap usage. I've been slowly learning it on the side myself. Do you have any good recommendations of books/websites for the library?

aasasd2• 8 years ago

I kept getting bitten by buildup sections instead of the rhythmic ones—can't tell trance from hi-nrg by whooshing air sounds. I highly doubt if this is feasible at this stage, but properly the app should use audio fingerprinting to choose the three samples that differ from each other.

Secondly, some of the offered genres are too close to each other to choose properly even for an edm nerd: the very first choice was between minimal house and deep house, with a rather bassy-dreamy track. This can be solved by marking similar genres one time in the database. Then, a higher difficulty setting could exist for hardcore geeks, presenting choices from neighboring genres.

Finally, it would be nice if the samples were of similar volume level, so I don't have to fiddle with it on my computer. Since the samples are short, you could analyze the volume on the fly with ReplayGain or a similar algorithm, and apply a correcting gain accordingly.

pierc3• 8 years ago

Well done, this is fun. Like someone else said, I didn't like the fact that all the tracks were in my YouTube history without you telling me.

fishtoaster• 8 years ago

That's very cool! As a nascent metalhead, I'd love to see a clone of this for that genre - I often have trouble telling my prog metal from my power metal.

strictnein2• 8 years ago

If you want a "classic" internet guide to electronic genres (as in, it was built in flash and has been around forever), as well as an opinionated history lesson, Ishkur's guide is great:

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

meatsock3• 8 years ago

ishkur wrote this completely tounge in cheek, it's a snarky satire. there are entirely made up genres and artists and not a whole lot of ways to tell what's accurate and what is not.

for example, there is no such thing as speedbass.

Kiro• 8 years ago

Yes, there is. Subgenre of speedcore.

morsch2• 8 years ago

Be that as it may, I've never found something comparable in terms of rapid music discovery and segmentation. I'd pay money for a version that (crucially:) works as well and is regularly updated.

Miner49er• 8 years ago

There is. http://www.speedbass.net/

usrusr2• 8 years ago

If the genres did not exist before, by assigning labels Ishkur changed that, forever. Of course it is full of snarky satire, but truth- and insightful nonetheless. Regarding made up artists, I wouldn't be so sure. It's certainly possible, but the set of obscure artists is immense. Even the set of obscure artist personas of one person can be incomprehensibly large.

If some of the music was just written for inclusion in the guide (which is entirely possible from my point of view since I can identify many, but not all of the examples), how would it be less real than anything else at the bounds of near-infinite obscurity? It would just be another "artist" backed by the same person or collective as the Ishkur handle, just like the numerous incarnations of Bangalter.

aasasd2• 8 years ago

It's not satire, it's hella informative, just some humor mixed in. Even if some of the info may be disputed, the wealth of the rest still outweighs.

The display of relations between genres is pretty much unparalleled, including the dive into subgenres solely focused on obscure features of parent genres, such as the kinkery going on in trance.

strictnein2• 8 years ago

This was super fun. A little bit of feedback:

The text telling you what the song was that just played goes away way too fast. It'd be nice if it stayed longer, or if a list built up somewhere to reference later.

Also, I may be crazy, and random things happen, but I swear 70% of the correct answers were the #1 option.

edit: At 72,000 or so points and haven't seen #4 show up as the correct answer.

jgh2• 8 years ago

i think it's your rng seed cause i've seen some 4's.

cecilpl2• 8 years ago

Very cool and I love the idea! I agree with sago that feedback on wrong answers would be super helpful. I'd like a brief description of the genre I guessed and the one it actually was.

Also, maybe links to youtube when you post the song title so I can save it for later if I liked it!

Also also, maybe a "beginner" option that restricts it to the (say) 20 most common genres. As someone who isn't super into EDM, the fine distinctions are lost on me.

akx• 8 years ago

Nice :)

155457 points before I ran out of lives (due to ambiguous tracks mostly ;) )

A couple things:

* There are some typos here and there (in genre names and in the UI)

* The timing of the game could be tightened up a little

* Would be nice to know how long I have for a given track, and how it affects my score. I was surprised more than once by the track changing from underneath me. (I assume I get more points for quick answers?)

* Maybe a non-infinite mode too, like... 10 questions, 3 lives?

wingerlang• 8 years ago

Nice, but it's very slow to progress.

stinos• 8 years ago

I was expecting this to mess up the lesser known styles (wouldn't be the first time I see a list of 'all' electronic music clearly written by someone who clearly only knows house in all it's variations and then just mentions there's also techno and dnb) but this one is pretty good and accurate actually.

One thing I wonder: how were the names chosen? E.g. I know what's meant with '(free)tek(k)no' and 'hardcore techno/rave' but I don't think anyone actually calls it like that. At least not around here. We use names like tek/hardcore/rave and that's 3 quite different genres. Maybe the names were picked to reflect a mix of what people call it?

slowmotarget• 8 years ago

Awesome! We need the same for metal music

kabacha• 8 years ago

Cool, but frustratingly slow.

Also what's the point of genres like "French House" and "Detroit Techno" etc. These genres are ridiculous to the point where it sounds like satire.

2038AD• 8 years ago

I may be wrong but I don't think they're particularly obscure genres

ryanlaws• 8 years ago

Detroit Techno isn't obscure at all. It's a very well-established genre including probably most famously the work by Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson. There have been at least 2 waves of it and it continues to influence electronic music from the fringes to the mainstream. If you're curious about it, I'd recommend Drexciya's The Quest as a starting point.

French House most likely refers the heavily filtered and compressed disco beats of e.g. Daft Punk, which had its heyday in the mid-to-late 1990s.

8bitsrule2• 8 years ago

?? Detroit Techno is one of the original EDM genres. Like, 30 years ago. You can't get less obscure.

sarreph• 8 years ago

This is great, and educational too! After playing quite a few rounds, I noticed I wasn't played any of the more esoteric categories such as '(free)tek(k)no' and 'french house' — seemed to most commonly fall on the bigger categories. Perhaps this is to be representative of the music landscape, but I fear that people won't hear enough of the lesser categories in order to learn from them.

I had fun, but one small criticism would be to speed up the time between rounds. The music quiz on the original iPod was a favourite time-waster of mine as a kid, and that was so addictive because it was quick to move to the next song.

Finally, if anyone is interested in a video walkthrough to the different electronic genres, this video helped me out immensely a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4r0MdBQI6U

reubenmorais• 8 years ago

Yeah, I noticed that most of the songs were coming from the more common genres. Maybe the game is sampling the song first, and then three other genres to go in the buttons, which would cause this. Sampling four genres and then picking a song from one of them would lead to a more diverse offering.

disko• 8 years ago

Nice, but classifications can be better. The Deep House track wasn't really exemplary IMO :) Then you hear Larry Heard - Can You Feel It which is classified as Chicago/Garage house...

harel2• 8 years ago

This is great fun, and aptly named: Dancemusic WTF. I find aspect of the seemingly infinite genres in electronic music very much WTF. Long ago i resorted to just call it all Techno (or "Dance music" if the mood strikes) and I use only two sub genres - tunes I like, and tunes I do not like. How can one keep up?

jdietrich2• 8 years ago

Trainspotters love to invent new sub-sub-sub genres, but hardly anyone actually uses those terms. There's a well-established taxonomy of dance music based on broad stylistic differences; Beatport and Juno both list about 30 genres, which I think is more than sufficient for any practical purpose.

harel2• 8 years ago

Indeed it is enough. As a former "dance music" producer, I always struggled with the classifications. I think other types of music suffer the same sub-genre affliction though.

moondowner2• 8 years ago

This would look like a good test for someone applying for maintaining DI.FM channels.

pinebox• 8 years ago

Needs a volume slider.

jdietrich2• 8 years ago

Nice work. I would quibble with some of the genre classifications. The game told me that Acperience by Hardfloor is classic trance, when it's quite clearly acid house. It classified Want You by Bearson as future garage, which it clearly isn't. It told me that Porcelain by Moby is "Ambient breaks/Illbient", which isn't a connection I would have made. It also seemed to wrongly categorise a couple of tracks as Hi-NRG, although I missed their names. I don't think that anyone from within the rave scene has ever used the term "breakbeat hardcore"; the Wikipedia article for the genre is totally devoid of references.

Personally, I think that a bit of simplification might be in order. A lot of tracks don't neatly fit into any genre and a lot of genres are pedantic labels rather than actual musical movements. A more concise and less contentious set of genres might be more useful to newcomers and less irritating to cratediggers. Learning the difference between Chicago house and Balearic house is very valuable if you're just starting to explore dance music, but I'm not sure there a useful delineation between Euro trance, classic trance, progressive trance and epic trance.

Also, a tracklisting at the end of the game would be very useful.

evanelias• 8 years ago

I don't think that anyone from within the rave scene has ever used the term "breakbeat hardcore"; the Wikipedia article for the genre is totally devoid of references.

Really? I've seen that term used for quite a long time, since the late 90s at least. Sometimes I see the variations "hardcore rave", "UK rave", "oldschool UK hardcore".

I don't know if folks in the early UK rave scene actually called it "breakbeat hardcore" in the early 90s, but it's a relatively common term for that genre in my experience. Granted, it's been 25 years since the genre was regularly encountered, so it's more of a historical/throwback thing at this point :)

qkls• 8 years ago

I almost exclusively listen to electronic music, but at least one of the choices was always a genre I haven't heard of. For example, I couldn't guess that Huoratron was "Fidget House / Complextro" though I have listened to him for years.

The game was fun though, only a tad slow to progress.

LostCharacter• 8 years ago

I really like this but 2 things: 1) I really wish there was a pause button. 2) Please notify the user that it is using their YouTube account to play music. My YT history has now blown up with songs, and it felt kind of invasive.

golergka2• 8 years ago

...and on the very first question this site makes the classic mistake of calling 2010's brostep scene (in this case, Pendulum) "dubstep".

Dubstep is a 00s dark and slow genre, unlistenable without frequencies below 150 Hz, from classic labels like Deep Medi Musik, Hyperdub, Tectonic, Tempa and others. Skrillex, Pendulum (which, btw, are more drum and bass influenced), Knife Party and other, mostly american, loud EDM artists have evolved from original dubstep, but have a very different sound.

I'm not trying to be elitist, and I don't think that one kind of music can be objectively better than other (only in my own personal view, which is of no consequence to other people). But calling two very different things with one word is just bad for communication.

jonahrd• 8 years ago

Could definitely use a sharing feature to compete with friends!

8bitsrule2• 8 years ago

Fun idea, and some great tracks. Be cool to pause game and goto YT and hear the whole track.

AngryData• 8 years ago

I failed miserably, but I only really listen to drum and bass or jungle these days.

dylan604• 8 years ago

Why does this kick my CPU into high gear, and suck the battery life out of my laptop? This is a serous drawback to what is an otherwise fun idea. I keep playing it, but man it's a serious heat generator to the point that I'm joking that I must be mining coins for the site to make money.

loganed• 8 years ago

I had a blast playing this. I cant be critical at all.

Show HN: Dancemusic.wtf – Quiz Game for Learning Electronic Dance Music Styles

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