Music-recommending website Sage claims that it can find you your new favourite band using artificial intelligence.
All you have to do is type in your favourite band and least favourite band, and Sage will come up with a list of recommendations for you, with a match percentage for each one and a link to listen.
Sage is the project of videographer and music curator Sunny Singh, who is also behind the punk concert video archive hate5six and used to be a data scientist.
"We've been able to leverage publicly available data about communal listening habits across over 200,000 bands and developed a novel model for finding new music," Singh explains. "The model has been able to learn fairly robust mathematical representations of bands that preserves their 'context': bands that share members, have similar tempos, are lyrically and thematically related, tend to cluster together in the embedded space. This enables the user to define taste profiles capturing what they do and don't like, and that corresponds to a well-defined set of mathematical operations on the embedded representations of bands."
You can read more about the technicalities behind the site here. But the real fun is putting it to the test. We tried it out with a search of Metallica as favourite band, and Slayer as least favourite to see what would come up. We’re not sure how accurate these suggestions are or how hard the site is trolling us, but our recommendations were Snowy Shaw (50.5% match), Fat Dragon (45.5% match) and, er, Puppy Puke (43.5% match). Could they be our new favourite bands? There’s only one way to find out…
Try out Sage for yourself here.
