A month or so after I wrote about the sad, sad state of robotically curated next-song-choosing functionality, I got an email from Alessandro Peluso, the creator of Sonic Oracle, a web-based music discovery engine. Interestingly, I had already heard about Sonic Oracle, having seen the occasional Reddit post about the software. I forget where—maybe in a Roon subreddit.
It turns out that Peluso had read my editorial. “Your streaming radio piece—I think I built the fix,” read the header of Peluso’s email. He went on to explain Sonic Oracle’s functionality and offered me a trial membership so I could give it a whirl. So, of course, I did.
First, the basics. Peluso, who’s based in Bologna, Italy, is a solo developer. Not being a programmer by trade, more self-taught, he uses AI to help him with the code that underlies Sonic Oracle. But Peluso emphasizes that music recommendations are produced by a software engine that he developed, not by generative AI. The service currently boasts over 500 paying subscribers. No, it’s not a free application, although there’s no charge to try it out—the first three playlist creations are on the house. It is reasonably priced, though: US$9.99 per month, US$59.99 annually, or US$149.99 for a lifetime subscription (if purchased before November 30; otherwise, US$179.99). That seems manageable to me, and the three free playlists are enough to see if Sonic Oracle is right for you.
“Discover music your streaming app can’t find” is Sonic Oracle’s tagline, and it claims that the playlists it generates are pulled from deep cuts, not just the greatest hits.
Sonic Oracle is available as Android and iOS apps, as well as a web-based application. Setup is quite simple. When signing up, you choose your target streaming service, and the app launches a sign-in screen for it. Note that you don’t provide Sonic Oracle with your sign-in credentials for the service. The actual sign-in authorization happens in the target service. This gives Sonic Oracle limited permissions in the streaming service—specifically, the ability to create playlists.
The functionality is fairly straightforward. You provide an artist, track, or album “seed,” based on which Sonic Oracle will build a playlist. The application then exports that playlist to the streaming service you chose at sign-up. Currently, Sonic Oracle is compatible with Tidal, Qobuz, Apple Music, and YouTube Music.
On opening the app, four buttons across the top of the page show the criteria available for building a playlist: Artist, Track, Album, and Artist Catalog. The last option restricts the resulting playlist to tracks specifically by the artist you choose. When you start entering your seed in the search box, the app attempts to pre-fill your selection by offering a list of matching results, which is nice.
If you use an artist as a seed, the app will show a list of related artists it plans to use in the playlist. From that list, you can exclude an artist or replace it with a new choice (which the engine will select for you). Exclusion will ban the artist forevermore. Feel free to use the exclusion button liberally, since you can view the jail list and free an artist at any time. Generating a playlist by track or album doesn’t call up the artist list.
There are two more controls below the search bar. The first is a three-way toggle (Essential, Balanced, and Adventurous) that sets how far the playlist travels from your seed. Essential sticks to the artists closest to your seed, Balanced widens the circle, and Adventurous reaches for more oblique connections. Choose Led Zeppelin, for instance, and Essential stays among the band’s closest peers, while Adventurous might reach back to the blues artists Zep drew from.
Randomness and variety are hallmarks of Sonic Oracle. No two playlists are the same—I’ve verified this, creating two playlists using the same seed track, and there was indeed wild divergence between the two, especially with the Adventurous setting.
The second toggle has two options: Popular and The Vault. Popular draws from each artist’s best-known tracks, so it’s likely to generate “safer” playlists—closer to what the streaming services build. I did not try this option—I used The Vault exclusively. The Vault is the whole point of this exercise: It sets the hits aside and picks from everything else, meaning album tracks, B‑sides, and deep cuts. Of note, the Essential-Balanced-Adventurous setting applies only to the Artist seed. Popular and The Vault are available on every tab: Artist, Track, Album, and Artist Catalog.
Over the two months that I’ve been evaluating Sonic Oracle, Peluso has been constantly refining the selection process. For the first few weeks, I found the resulting playlists fun and intuitive, but I still ended up skipping about 20 percent of the tracks, as they sometimes didn’t seem to fit. Peluso was always keen to hear my opinions, and I wasn’t shy to share my findings with him.
At the beginning of my evaluation, Sonic Oracle only offered three seed criteria—Artist, Track, and Artist Catalog—and I often found the results of the Artist option too broad. Feeding in Tom Waits or John Zorn was frustrating, as both musicians have huge and varied catalogs. If I wanted to hear music based on Real Gone, but not Heartattack and Vine, I’d have to use the Track button, which could be too limiting. Peluso responded by creating the Album button, which considered all songs from the chosen album when building the playlist.
The Album qualifier worked very well, and I built a bunch of playlists with it. Peluso and I conversed further about the meaning—the intent—of an album. Should the resulting playlist be based on genre and era? Or was the concept of mood important? Mood should encompass the tone, the intent of a track. While I was applying the finishing touches to this article, Peluso emailed to let me know that he’d installed an update to the Track functionality, based on our discussions. I tried it out using the Tom Waits song “Don’t Go into That Barn,” and holy hell, what a barn burner. Out of the 40 tracks in the playlist that Sonic Oracle generated, I didn’t feel the need to skip a single one. On the contrary, I kept peeking at Roon’s Now Playing page to see what I was listening to. Just like the Waits seed track, the resulting playlist was incredibly quirky, filled with off-beat Mexican folk songs, straight-up rockers just a few degrees off perpendicular, and mad-as-a-hatter insanity. A few days later, Peluso shot me an email saying that the mood enhancement was now implemented in the Artist and Album modes.
I became intensely curious about the guts of Sonic Oracle. The IT guy in me was constantly trying to reverse-engineer its choices, and I developed and discarded numerous pseudocode drafts in my head. But Peluso is extremely guarded about his application. I asked several times for more information about Sonic Oracle’s processes—what is its data source? How does it determine degrees of separation? The fullest answer I got was this:
The engine is built on a proprietary database of real artist-to-artist connections assembled and refined from a range of public music-metadata sources, combined with my own processing to correct the gaps and errors those sources have on their own. The correction layer is where the quality comes from.
Fair enough, and I can certainly understand Peluso’s reluctance to divulge more information. Sonic Oracle, in my opinion, stands head and shoulders above the next-song functionality in Qobuz, Tidal, and Roon, and not just because of the quality of its choices. The controllability of the process is brilliant, as it permits the creation of tailored playlists. Want to dig deeper into related artists you might never otherwise discover? Slam in your artist and make it Adventurous. Having a party and need to keep everyone engaged? Make it Balanced and Popular.
Still, I pressed Peluso for more details:
The Vault is the reason why I started this project. It basically does the opposite of what every streaming platform does. It picks only from everything else: album tracks, B‑sides, and the songs that never made the compilations. So a Vault playlist and a Popular playlist from the same seed don’t share much. Most of the time, not even a single track.
From there, a few other things happen along the way, mostly polishing touches: studio versions only. Live recordings, alternate takes, karaoke, and cover acts are left out. No artist dominates. Each one gets a few tracks, so the playlist keeps moving. Every Vault run is different. The deep cuts are drawn in a randomized order each time, so the same seed gives you a new playlist every day.
I would imagine there’s an opportunity here for Peluso. I could easily see one of the majors licensing Peluso’s engine and incorporating it as a feature in its suite of controls. I generally don’t poke around in Qobuz’s guts, preferring to interface directly with Roon. And Roon’s playlist generation is . . . very limited. You can save a playlist from the queue generated by Roon Radio’s mumblings after it’s been chugging along for a while, but that’s really it. Qobuz offers a whole bunch of pre-generated playlists based on mood, artist, and all that, but they offer nowhere near the customization that Sonic Oracle provides.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sonic Oracle’s technology popping up elsewhere. But that’s just idle speculation. Peluso is obviously passionate about Sonic Oracle—that’s clear from the way he talks about it, and how readily he accepted input and acted on it. In the meantime, it works great as it stands, and I’m having tons of fun with it. I hereby proclaim Sonic Oracle as my streaming discovery of the year, even if it sorta-kinda discovered me.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
