← The Similarities Engine

Archive of 1996–1998 submissions

Nobody told it what a genre was.

Between 1996 and 1998 this site asked one question: name five albums you love. Thousands of people answered. The only thing the engine ever did was count which albums turned up on the same list. Every cluster below fell out of that counting. No genre tag, no critic, no model.

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pinch or scroll to zoom · drag to pan · tap an album to name it

Circle size is how strongly an album is tied to the rest of the map. Position is force-directed on the connections alone. Zoom in to pull the dense middle apart; album names appear once there is room for them.

album pairs recorded
scenes that emerged
of links cross artists
since the data was collected

The scenes, and what anchors each

SceneAlbumsCohesion Most connected record

Method

Cohesion is the share of a scene's connection weight that stays inside it. It is the number that decides whether a scene is a real thing rather than an artefact of the clustering, and therefore whether it is honest to let the layout pull toward it.

Source: Similarities Engine submission archive, 1996–1998.
Built . Layout: Fruchterman-Reingold, NumPy.

Elsewhere on this site

/five — get recommendations from your own five favourites /walk — step from album to album /game — the guessing game /albums — every album with its own page