"There’s a song for how you feel. The problem is, it’s buried under 100 million others."
Sonora is a community-driven experiment in emotional music discovery—built for listeners who feel overlooked, for artists who remain undiscovered, and for everyone tired of being fed the same safe algorithmic loops.
What if we could find music the way we feel it—not by genre or release date, but by mood, texture, and what’s happening inside us?
Sonora is our answer. It’s not a product. It’s not a startup. It’s an open-source project fueled by shared curiosity and sound.
- Creates living playlists based on emotional resonance, musical structure, and user-submitted tags.
- Uses a blend of machine learning, audio analysis, and community input to organize music by how it feels, not how it sells.
- Surfaces buried gems—old, new, obscure, global—based on your emotional context.
- Helps independent artists reach the people who are most likely to love their sound.
- 🔖 Crowd-tagged taxonomy of emotional states, moods, and musical traits.
- 🧬 Inspired by the Music Genome Project, built with modern machine learning.
- 🎶 Designed to evolve with you—your listening shapes what Sonora becomes.
- 🕊️ Not for sale. Not ad-supported. Not for data mining. Ever.
- Instead of manually creating mood-based lists, Sonora could read the emotional fingerprint of your current listening (e.g., downtempo, in a minor key, sparse lyrics) and generate a “mood-web”—living playlists that evolve as your state changes, rather than remain fixed in time.
- No more static categories like “80s” or “Indie Rock.” Playlists could intersect like Venn diagrams:
- “Melancholy + Acoustic + 2000s”
- “Driving Music + Minor Key + Latin Influence”
- Each list becomes permeable, borrowing and shifting as your emotional and aesthetic preferences change.
- Discovery today is skewed by trends and algorithms. Sonora aims to surface buried treasure—songs from unknown artists that genuinely match your taste, even if they’ve never gone viral.
- Musicians with emotionally complex, slow-burn work often go unnoticed.
- Sonora helps artists find audiences based on deep compatibility, not ad spend or TikTok trends.
- Imagine: a platform where an artist is discovered because their song sounds like your soul.
- 🎛 Playlist Sculpting Mode: Drag a “mood slider” to adjust your playlist in real time—shift from energetic to introspective without starting over.
- 🔍 "What You’re Missing" Feed: A daily list of songs you’d likely love but haven’t heard—from all over the world and all eras.
- 🤝 Collaborative Emotional Playlists: You and a friend can feed a list with mood signals, not just songs.
We’re looking for collaborators who care more about music than metrics:
- 🎧 Listeners & curators to tag songs by emotional, musical, or lyrical qualities.
- 🧠 Data scientists & devs to help with playlist generation, clustering, and ML pipelines.
- 🎨 Designers & writers to help communicate the project with clarity and beauty.
- 🎼 Artists & musicians who want to help shape a new discovery model.
See CONTRIBUTING for details.
- ✅ Initial schema for mood and music tagging
- ✅ Repo launched under AGPLv3 license
- ⏳ Community seeding, playlist engine prototyping
- 🧭 Outreach to indie musicians, open-source devs, and AI ethicists
Sonora is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. This means:
- You can use, share, and improve it freely
- If you host it publicly, you must share your changes
- Commercial exploitation without contribution is prohibited
See LICENSE for details.
Open an issue or start a discussion here in the repo. Or email [putouts-specs8n@icloud.com].
Let’s build something real—and let it sing.