About Boil the Frog
Boil the Frog lets you create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style
to another. It's like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. If you heat up the pot slowly enough, the
frog will never notice that he's being made into a stew and jump out of the pot. With a Boil the
frog playlist you can do the same, but with music. You can generate a playlist that will take the
listener from one style of music to the other, without the listener ever noticing that they are being made
into a stew.
How does it work?
To create a Boil The Frog playlist, just type in the names of two artists and a playlist will be generated that takes you gradually, step by step, from the first artist to the second artist. You can click on any song to hear the song. Click on the first song to hear the whole playlist. If you don't like a particular artist you can route around that particular artist by clicking the 'bypass' button. The 'New Track' button will select a different track for an artist.
If you are a logged-in Rdio subscriber you will hear full tracks, otherwise you will hear excerpts.
Here are some examples
- Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis
- Justin Bieber to Jimi Hendrix
- Mickey Mouse to deadmau5
- Patti Smith to the Smiths
- Elvis to Elvis
- The Carter Family to Rammstein
- Kanye West to Taylor Swift
How does it really work?
To create this app, The Echo Nest artist similarity info is used to build an artist similarity graph of about 100,000 of the most popular artists. Each artist in the graph is connected to it's most similar neighbors according to the Echo Nest artist similarity algorithm.
When a playlist between two artists is created, the graph is used to find the path between the two artists. The path isn't necessarily the shortest path through the graph. Instead, priority is given to paths that travel through artists of similar popularity. If you start and end with a popular artist, you are more likely to find a path that takes you though other popular artists, and if you start with a long-tail artist you will likely find a path through other long-tail artists.
Once the path of artists is found, we need to select the best songs for the playlist. To do this, we pick a well-known song for each artist that minimizes the difference in energy between this song, the previous song and the next song.
Once we have selected the best songs, we build a playlist using Rdio's nifty web api.
Who made this?
This app was built by Paul Lamere. If you like this sort of thing you may be interested in my blog at Music Machinery.