In less capable hands, the improbable mash-ups of Beyonce and Phoenix would sound terrible — but album after album, Girl Talk turns his mixes into bass-heavy, body-bouncing, party-fueling tracks. If you’ve ever wondered how the delicately layered samples interact with each other, you can get an idea by playing this visualizer, set to Girl Talk’s 2010 album All Day.
FastCo Labs reports that Matt Adereth has added a visual layer to his annotated guide of the album, which features almost every sample in the track along with timestamps. As you play the visualization, title images of the songs being sampled pop up:
This is how he did it, according to FastCo:
Using illegal-tracklist.net (a completely legal site FYI), Adereth wrote a parser to effectively drive the visualization. Almost all samples from the album are included, though it isn’t 100%. Doing the album annotation as a side project, it took hum a few weeks to complete.
“The biggest challenge was getting the years for the tracks that don’t have Wikipedia pages, which required me to do some manual searching,” Adereth says. “Eventually I found Who Sampled, which had all the details I was missing.”
