The bad news is that I’m having some DNS issues with majorminer.com. The good news, is that you can now access the same great MajorMiner game and search at majorminer.org.
The other good news is that there’s a new and improved search page. Hopefully it’s easier to understand what’s going on, I’ve even added a FAQ. If you look hard enough, you might also notice a new feature I’ve introduced: similarity browsing. For each clip that was autotagged, I computed a similarity value between its autotag vector and all of the others, finding the thirty or so nearest neighbors. You can follow this web of similarity around to some fun stuff, even though it’s not a huge collection of music. Here’s a random starting place.
This similarity is a semantic similarity, as Doug Turnbull likes to call it. The the clips might not have an exactly similar sound, the rhythms might not match, or they might differ in an instrument or two, but for the most part you would describe them with the same sorts of words. If you want to know what kinds of words we’re talking about, take a look at the autotagging results. Have a look and let me know what you think (you can leave a link to any exceptional results you find in the comments).