PreTAGAME Analysis of Pre-House and -Techno

This is an explorative study on how genres like Electronic Body Music (EBM) and Hi-NRG (Pretechno) influenced the sound of HOuse and Techno from Germany and AMErica (HOTGAME) using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM):

• The Nations Map shows that Pretechno does not exhibit a nation-specific sound in contrast to House and Techno
• The Artists Map shows that only Bad Boys Blue, Donna Summer and Mike Mareen exhibit the US-Techno/House sound. The others sound primarily German, including AI-generated music (Napster AI and Suno AI)
• The Genre Map shows that most Pretechno-genres affected the German techno sound more than the US techno sound. The only exceptions are electrofunk/freestyle and Eurodisco.

These observations, discussed in relationship to narratives about the development of the scenes, provide evidence where the US- and Germany-typical House and Techno sound from the 1980s to 1994 came from: The German sound is a clear rediscovery of Darkwave, EBM, Hi-NRG, Synth-Pop, etc. The US-sound is more unique, but partly Eurodance- and electrofunk/freestyle-inspired.

The HOTGAME dataset of early house and techno music from Germany and America served as a ground truth and is available online. The recording studio feature extraction code is also available online. The SOM and the analysis code can be found on the PreTAGAME Pretechno-Analysis project page. © Tim Ziemer 2026

Find an overview of Tim Ziemer's software projects here.