ABOUT SOUND GUESSR

Sound Guessr is a music geography game. You hear a 30-second clip of music and try to guess which city it comes from by clicking on a map. The closer you are, the more points you earn.

The game draws from hundreds of city-specific music scenes — from Detroit techno to Lagos afrobeats to Stockholm indie. Each round picks a random city and plays a track from one of its most distinctive local genres.

HOW IT WORKS

The music data comes from Every Noise at Once, a project created by Glenn McDonald. It algorithmically maps over 6,000 music genres and connects them to cities around the world.

The cities page ranks which genres are most distinctively associated with each city — not just what people listen to, but what music is most characteristic of a place. For each genre, Every Noise curates a "The Sound of" Spotify playlist with representative tracks.

We pull track metadata from those playlists via the Spotify API. For audio previews, we use Apple Music — Spotify deprecated free preview URLs in their API in late 2024, so we match tracks by name and artist against Apple Music's catalog at runtime to get playable 30-second clips.

CREDITS

Music data: Every Noise at Once by Glenn McDonald
Track metadata: Spotify Web API
Audio previews: Apple Music
Maps: Mapbox + Leaflet