Paul's Music Wreckommender
I just posted my music hack day hack. It is called Paul's Music Wreckommender. Use this Wreckommender to find anti-recommendations. Give the wreckommender an artist that you like and it will give you a playlist of tracks from artists that are very different from the seed artist. Some obvious use cases:
Your 14 year old daughter's slumber party is getting too loud. Send the girls home by putting on the Hannah Montana Wreckommender - which yields a playlist with tracks by Glenn Gould, Dream Theater and Al Hirt.
It's time to break up with your girl friend. Give her the 'You are the wind beneath my wings' wrecklist and your intentions will be clear.
If you like 'everything but country' then Garth Williams will guide the way: Garth Williams Wreckommendations
You can try it out at Wreckommender.com.
How it works:
This was a pretty easy hack. I already had a playlister engine with some neat properties. It maintains a complete artist graph using Echo Nest artist similarities, so I can make make routes through the artist space for making smooth artist/song transitions. Adapting this playlister engine to create wreckommendations was really easy. To create the recommendations, I find the seed node in the graph and then from this node I find the set of artists that have the longest 'shortest path' to the seed artist. These are the artists that are furthest away from the seed artists. I then select songs from this set to make my 'wrecklist'. However, this list isn't the best list. There are a small set of artists that are far away from everything. These artists become frequent wrecommendations for many many artists, which is bad. To avoid this problem I adapted the algorithm to find far away artist clusters and then draw artists from that cluster. This gives yields a playlist with much more variety.
This hack is primarily for fun, but I think there's something in the wreckommendations that is worth persuing. When asked to describe their taste in music, many people will use a negative - such as "Anything but country and rap". If this is really the case, then using the wreckommender to literally find 'anything but country and rap' - whether it is J-Pop or crabcore might actually be useful.
Inspiration
A couple of sources of inspiration for this hack. First, the name. A word like 'wreckommendation' clearly deserves an application. Second, a coffee pot conversation with Reid, and finally, the LibraryThing Unsuggester, which does a similar thing for books (but in a very different way).
I hope you like the wreckommender, let me know if you find any interesting wreckommendations.