What is the Binary Jazz genrenator?
Much like Binary Jazz itself, the genrenator is the product of a bunch of us chatting and tossing ideas around and something sticks. In this case, it came from a discussion about obscure genres we didn't know existed, veered to the Every Noise At Once database that Spotify uses to inform their genres and playlists, and ended with the question "what if we could create an API that served random genres?"
The Genrenator Twitter bot is also a product of this.
How does it work?
We used Every Noise At Once as a base to take parts of genres from, then created internal catalogs of each genre "fragment". These catalogs are broken into instruments, beats, adjectives, prefixes and suffixes, regions, and genres. We also used Every Noise to inform our list of patterns which are used to combine the above fragments in unique ways.
We've created pages on this site for the two types of text strings that this API can produce, genres and genre stories.
The Genrenator API
The real fun of the Genrenator is the public API hosted on binaryjazz.us. If you're a developer (particularly one in need of a random genre or story about a genre), you can use the endpoint to fetch a random genre or genre story at https://binaryjazz.us/wp-json/genrenator/v1.
We have 2 endpoints, one for genres and one for stories. These are located at
https://binaryjazz.us/wp-json/genrenator/v1/genre/
https://binaryjazz.us/wp-json/genrenator/v1/story/respectively. Each endpoint can be fed an additional parameter if you want more than one result returned. For example, going to https://binaryjazz.us/wp-json/genrenator/v1/story/25/ will return an array of 25 stories.
If you're interested in contributing to the development of the Genrenator, feel free to checkout the repository on GitHub and submit issues or pull requests!
Feel free to play with the
Since April 2018, the genrenator has created 5,300,798 genres.