The aether was a medium no one could find for a phenomenon everyone could observe. In All About Lily Chou-Chou, it's the name for what music transmits that language can't capture. This project tries to map it anyway.
Aether Atlas is also a digital journal of my own thoughts and feelings for songs that I enjoy or hold a special place in my heart. In its current state, many reviews will likely be informal and not terribly well thought out or polished. This project started as a google doc titled "Songs/Albums". And I enjoyed writing it, so I figured that I wanted to turn it into something more.
You may have noticed that this website doesn't look like your typical music review website. The Aether Atlas is a map of the intangible. In concept, songs which are more similar should be nearer and songs that are far apart should be further from each other. Using a large enough dataset of triplet similarity rankings (e.g. which song is more similar to A? B or C?), we are able to converge on a geometric space that preserves these orderings, effectively allowing us to map out "psychological space". This is a common practice in the cognitive sciences, and I was recently exposed to it as a part of my lab group. I won't go too deep into methodology, because frankly, I am but a wee undergrad who doesn't know much about it. If you want some more technical detail, visit the GitHub repo. Thanks for visiting!