A music universe: a canonical sky of artists and genres you explore through real listening.
lyrid turns the music world into a night sky. Every artist is a star, every genre a nebula, similarity forms the routes between them — one canonical map for everyone, with a personal fog of war over it. You light up your own sky by actually listening: previews are scans, full listens are landings, and your scrobbles fuel the journey.
Named after the Lyrids — the meteor shower radiating from Lyra, the lyre of Orpheus: music falling from the sky as stars.
- Exploration — fog of war, a starship with fuel, light as currency, quests and hidden treasures. Chosen once, played for years.
- Creative — the whole sky open from the first minute: a daily instrument for studying music.
Only the creative mode is built today, so it is the one every account starts in. The choice between them arrives with the fog, when there is something to choose between.
The universe is assembled locally from open dumps and datasets — MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, Discogs, Wikidata, Wikipedia, AcousticBrainz — with similarity and the sky layout computed by lyrid itself. Listening goes out to the services the canon already links to, and to the artist's own channel embedded in place — never through a streaming API on the critical path (ADR 0011); scrobbling connects via ListenBrainz.
Pre-alpha, and the sky is on screen: 206,636 artists rendered in WebGL2, with accounts and a privacy charter you can press. The interface speaks English and Russian and can be walked by keyboard. The sky can be read with the observer's instruments — eras, genre names, why neighbours are near, comparisons, routes — and listened to: the radio of any nebula, and a daily signal from a faint star to go and find. Only the creative mode is built; the fog of war comes next. What landed when is in the CHANGELOG; how it fits together, in the architecture.
lacodda.github.io/lyrid — guides, reference, and the architecture decision records.
MIT (c) Kirill Lakhtachev