Hacker News: proper_black

New comment by proper_black in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

proper_black — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:46:31 +0000

Still working on Overtone, a tool that allows one to visualize the relationships documented in MusicBrainz, probably the largest crowdsourced music DB in existence, using graphs. You can right-click anything to expand into its subgraph.

It already runs pretty smoothly. Next steps are adding a way to make playlists and listen to them right there, without leaving the page. Check it out and let me know what you think! All feedback is appreciated!

https://overtone.kernelpanic.lol

New comment by proper_black in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

proper_black — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:08:13 +0000

Hi there! Thank you :D I just looked up both Devonte Hynes and Solange and put them on the same graph. They indeed seem to be disconnected, but I also couldn't find the single you mentioned at all, so yeah, it's probably just absent from the DB. If you ever find the time and motivation to add it to MusicBrainz, it will show up in time on my copy, though :) I haven't yet, but plan on scheduling replication weekly or so, so that the graph can evolve along with the data. Thanks again and be sure to send any feedback you might have in the future my way!

EDIT: Oh, and I definitely want to make playlists a part of it, haven't figured out the best way yet. The dream would be to use something like Bandcamp and actively encourage people to give money directly to the artists, but it might not be the most straight-forward way to do it. Stay tuned though, playlists will be there in the future

New comment by proper_black in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

proper_black — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:02:18 +0000

Thanks for the kind comment! :D Hope you get some more time soon! Be sure to play around with expanding stuff, adding the subgraphs of two random artists and seeing how they intersect and check it out once a week or so, as I'm actively making changes over there. Any and all feedback is appreciated if anything comes up :)

New comment by proper_black in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

proper_black — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:11:19 +0000

I’ve been exploring graph theory and built Overtone, an interactive graph that maps musical artists, genres, albums, labels, instruments, and their relationships using MusicBrainz data. This spun out of a separate graph-based fraud-detection project that I hope to introduce on HN sometime soon.

It’s a beta, but already works well on desktop and makes it easy to explore musical neighborhoods and discover new artists by traversing the graph.

Here's the link in case you wanna find some new music to listen to, or look at the artists you know and love in a different light - https://overtone.kernelpanic.lol

Feedback welcome — especially on UI/UX and scalability limits.

New comment by proper_black in "Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese"

proper_black — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 04:01:05 +0000

This exact thing is called "washawasheo" or "washawashear" in (Mexican) Spanish. It would be cool to know what languages have this, as I'm pretty sure not all of them do (Russian doesn't, for example).