Dark Music Corpus
Navigate a music corpus of your own, by ear and by eye, and play it into Ableton Live.
What it does
The tool cuts your audio into 2-second clips, describes each clip by its sound — spectral shape, loudness, timbre (MFCC), pitch content (chroma) and rhythm — and lays the corpus out as a map: similar clips sit close together, clusters group them, unusual clips are marked as outliers, and every clip knows its ten nearest neighbours. Hover to listen; select, step and trace to move through the corpus.
Your audio never leaves your computer. Press ◫ your corpus and pick a folder: the analysis runs in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded.
The map you see first is a demo: the record Sounding Numbers, analysed beforehand.
Playing into Ableton Live
Download the Max for Live devices and the DMC Starter set from the project repository. Put DMC Hub on the Master track, set DMC Corpus's root to the same folder you picked here, then press Ableton: link in the sound panel.
- Chrome asks once to allow access to devices on your local network: allow it.
- Firefox links directly.
- Safari explores and listens, but cannot link to Live: use Chrome or Firefox for that.
The demo audio
Sounding Numbers by Miguel Angel Crozzoli (Kairos KAI0022047, 2024). Performers: Miguel Angel Crozzoli, Calum Builder, Jūra Elena Šedytė, Valeria Miracapillo, Ida Nørby, Johannes Nästesjö. The demo uses the eight v2 masters of I Am The Forest I–V and I Am The Ocean I–III. All rights reserved. Only short, low-quality excerpts of each clip are published, for listening only; the full tracks are not.
Credits
| Concepts | Thor Magnusson, Sonic Writing (2019) — the signal–symbol framework · M. A. Crozzoli et al., Dark Sonification, ICAD 2025 · Dietmar Offenhuber, Autographic Design (2023) |
| Methods | UMAP (McInnes, Healy, Melville 2018) · k-means with silhouette · Isolation Forest (Liu, Ting, Zhou 2008) · MIR features after librosa (McFee et al. 2015) |
| Model | CLAP laion/larger_clap_music by LAION (Apache-2.0; Wu et al., ICASSP 2023) — used by the desktop engine and the demo's precomputed readings |
| In this page | D3.js v7 (ISC) · umap-js 1.4 with ml-matrix and ml-levenberg-marquardt (MIT) · Rubik and Karla fonts (SIL OFL 1.1) · the Dark Sonification style kit |
| Devices | Max for Live (Cycling '74 / Ableton) · Ableton's Abl.Map / Abl.MapUi, inside the frozen devices |
| Hosting | GitHub Pages |