HOTGAME House and Techno Analysis

This is an explorative study of the HOuse and Techno from Germany and AMErica (HOTGAME) using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM):

• The Nations Map shows that German and US-American house and techno music are different
• The Years Map shows that early German music emulated the US-sound, but established various new sounds between 1992 and 1994.
• The Styles Map shows that most house and techno tracks from the US are much alike (like acid house, Chicago house, deep house, the first wave of Detroit techno, garage, hip house), while German styles are different (like breakbeat, Eurodance, hardtrance, tekkno, trance). German downbeat, house and hardcore are almost identical to their American counterpart.

These observations, discussed in relationship to narratives about the development of the scenes, provide evidence why techno became a mass phenomenon in Germany, but not in the United States: The German music had a larger variety and progressed over time. This helped matching many people's taste and keep the movement alive.

The HOTGAME dataset of early house and techno music from Germany and America is available online. The corpus does not contain any audio material, but descriptive recording studio features. The recording studio feature extraction code is also available online. The SOM and the analysis code can be found on the Techno-Analysis project page. © Tim Ziemer 2025

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