- How does the Music Taste Analyzer work?
- It's a static analyzer — no API, no machine learning. Each of the 20 genres has a hand-calibrated mood vector across four dimensions: chill, energy, emotion, and intensity. When you select genres, we average those vectors. Your eclecticism score is the fraction of the 20 genres you picked, scaled to 100. Your twin genre is the selected genre whose vector is closest to your averaged profile (squared Euclidean distance). Your outlier is the one furthest from it. Artist names are matched against a roughly 50-name reference list of major acts to estimate decade representation.
- Why do you call this a static analyzer instead of a streaming app?
- Because that's what it is. We don't have OAuth into Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music — we don't see what you've played, when, or how long. We can't see if you've actually listened to the artists you typed. The analyzer reads what you tell it and runs lookup-table math against it. That's a feature, not a limitation: nothing leaves your browser, you don't need an account, and the result depends on what you say, not what an algorithm decided you should care about.
- What's an eclecticism score and what does mine mean?
- It's a simple metric: how many of the 20 genres you selected, scaled to a 0–100 number. Selecting 4 genres gives you 20. Selecting 10 gives you 50. Selecting all 20 gives you 100. High eclecticism means you're a wide-net listener — you don't pick lanes, you pick weather. Low eclecticism means you know what you like and you don't apologize for it. Neither is better. The interesting question is whether your eclecticism matches your self-image — most people land somewhere unexpected.
- What are the twin and outlier genres?
- Twin genre is the selected genre whose mood signature is closest to the average of everything you picked. Think of it as your center of gravity — if your whole taste collapsed to one genre, that's the one. Outlier genre is the selected genre whose signature is furthest from that average. It's your secret taste — the thing you like that doesn't fit the rest of the pattern. Most people's outliers are more interesting than their twins. If you only select one genre, there's no outlier (you need at least two points to have one stick out).
- How accurate is the era detection from artist names?
- Useful, not exhaustive. We carry a reference list of around 50 major acts mapped to their debut decade — The Beatles (1960s), Queen (1970s), Michael Jackson (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Beyoncé (2000s), Billie Eilish (2010s), Olivia Rodrigo (2020s), and so on. Artists not on the list come back as "unknown" — we don't fake confidence. If you want a decade reading, throw in a couple of bigger names. The era data isn't a verdict on you; it's a sample of which decades the analyzer happened to recognize.
- Is my data saved anywhere?
- No. Everything runs in your browser. The artists you type, the genres you click, your mood and hours — none of it leaves the page. We don't store responses, we don't log them, we couldn't link them back to you if we tried. Close the tab and it's gone.
- Why are some genres rated low on "chill" but high on "emotion"?
- Because chill and emotion aren't opposites. Metal scores 6 on emotion (the songs are about something — grief, rage, defiance) but 1 on chill (the sound is loud and dense). Folk scores 8 on both — emotional and quiet at the same time. Ambient scores 10 on chill but only 5 on emotion (it's the most relaxed and the most affectively neutral). The four dimensions are designed to capture different aspects of a genre's vibe, not collapse into a single axis.
- I picked all 20 genres. What does that mean?
- Eclecticism 100. Your mood profile flattens toward the average of all genres (around the middle of every dimension), so the twin/outlier picks become less informative. The signal in this tool is the contrast between what you pick and what you don't pick — when you pick everything, you're effectively picking nothing. If you want a sharper reading, narrow the list to the genres you'd actually listen to on a road trip.
- Can I share my result?
- Right now, no — there's no share-card export. The result is on-screen. You can screenshot it. If sharing turns out to matter, we'll add a proper share image; until then we're keeping the tool to one job: showing you the result.
