Some weekends simply hit every single note.
On Saturday, I stood pitchside at Royal White Star HC cheering on my son’s field hockey team as they battled through the wet turf to a 4-2 victory. On Sunday, it was my turn to lace up the shoes away at Mechelen HC—where my own team ground out a tight 1-2 win. Two matches, two victories, sore calves, muddy shinguards, and that unbeatable post-game clubhouse buzz.
And in the quiet windows between Saturday’s final whistle, Sunday’s warm-up, and a bottomless moka pot of dark roast coffee? I finally sat down and shipped a fun weekend tinkering experiment: Barogroove (bg.netdev.be) — a barometer-induced AI Daylist maker seeded by years of Last.fm scrobbles. The Python source code is up on GitHub at jpaquay/myshippedpy.
1. Why Weather + Scrobbles? (The Brussels Hypothesis)
If you live in Belgium, you learn early on that human mood is governed by two things: the quality of the coffee in your hand and the barometric pressure (hPa) outside your window.
Streaming platforms have tried to crack dynamic playlists for years. Spotify’s Daylist is clever, but its time-of-day heuristics (“tuesday afternoon goblin core indie”) miss the meteorological reality of the sky. A crisp, high-pressure 1028 hPa winter morning calls for a completely different acoustic geometry than a falling barometer right before a late-summer storm front rolls across Brussels.
More importantly, generic AI music tools suffer from amnesia: they hallucinate recommendations from a generic global average instead of respecting your actual lifelong musical DNA. I didn’t want a chatbot guessing what “rainy music” sounds like; I wanted an engine seeded directly by my own 160,717 Last.fm scrobbles logged between 2012 and 2026.
2. The Atmospheric Sonic Forge: Street-Art Geo-Caches & Genre Corridors
When you open the app, you don’t pick a generic genre. You step into the Atmospheric Sonic Forge:
- World Street-Art Geo-Caches (Tap to Teleport): Instead of sterile city codes, Barogroove anchors its live weather telemetry (
Google Weather API) to iconic global street-art corridors. With one click, you can teleport your barometer between:-
🎨 Parcours BD Comic Strip Trail (Brussels) — *Home turf: Gabled Brussels facades celebrating Franco-Belgian ligne claire art ( Hergé, Franquin, Bonom & Brussels muralists#new-beat #ebm #ethio-jazz #electronic-chanson)* - 🧱 East Side Gallery (Berlin) — 1.3 km open-air monument along the Spree
- 巷 Hosier Lane (Melbourne)
- 🌴 Wynwood Walls (Miami)
- 🇧🇷 Beco do Batman (São Paulo)
- 🏮 Shimokitazawa (Tokyo)
-
- Cross Two Axes (Theme × Genre Corridor): “The sky picks the mood. You pick the vocabulary.”
- Weather Themes: Choose between Petrichor, Golden Hour, Nordic Fog, Storm Front, Heatwave Cruise, Blue Hour, First Frost, or Sirocco.
- Genre Corridors (
±25% Band): Fine-tune the sonic spectrum across eight curated corridors—Krautrock (Motorik pulse, patient repetition), Ambient (Space before notes), Dub (Bass and the room it echoes in), Post-punk (Tight, cold, wiry), Modern classical (Strings and restraint), Jazz (Conversation, not consensus), Techno (Machines keeping time), and Folk (One voice, weather-worn).
3. Spinning the Set: Slowcore & Lo-Fi for a Storm Front (& Surviving HTTP 429s)
Here is what happens when you point Barogroove at the Parcours BD Comic Strip Trail in Brussels under a Storm Front (-0.7 hPa/6h):
The engine synthesizes an 18-track set titled:
slowcore & lo fi afternoon — storm front daylist at 125 BPM under a steady barometer
The barometer is in free fall. Turn it up. (#slowcore #lo fi #space rock #sparse #tape #melancholy)
Look at that opening 5-track sequence on the In-App Soundtrack Deck:
- Duster — Constellations (Stratosphere)
- Talk Talk — New Grass
- Sunn O))) — Big Church
- Tinariwen — Sastanaqqam
- Slowdive — Souvlaki Space Station
From Duster’s lo-fi slowcore to Talk Talk’s post-rock, Sunn O))) drone metal cathedral chords, Tinariwen desert blues, and Slowdive shoegaze—all locked to a 125 BPM storm-front pulse.
Weekend Engineering Lesson — Graceful Degradation & Transparency: Notice two details in the screenshot above. First, when Spotify’s Web API throws a classic HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) rate-limit, Barogroove automatically writes an annotated M3U playlist file (18 tracks, 1h40m45s) with track-by-track AI reasoning embedded inside the file comments, alongside instant one-click links to play on Spotify or YouTube Music. Second, if a requested theme parameter degrades or falls back to live sky telemetry (Theme degraded: unknown theme 'clear_high'; sky picked instead), the UI surfaces it transparently.
4. 160,717 Scrobbles in BigQuery: What My Musical Almanac Says About Me
Because I couldn’t resist connecting my listening history to BigQuery and Vertex AI (gemini-2.5-flash), I built a conversational Data Viz tab where you can query your entire musical almanac in plain English—and inspect the exact SQL query the agent ran.
Across 160,717 synced plays (2012–2026) with a play-weighted average tempo of 104.6 BPM, my Atmospheric Weather Affinity Breakdown reveals my true French/Belgian musical soul:
| Weather Regime | Share (Scrobbles) | Avg Tempo | Dominant Artist in My Almanac |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warm Front Haze & Analog Drift | 15.6% (25,090 plays) | 101 BPM | 🎸 Georges Brassens |
| Petrichor & Rain Front | 15.2% (24,376 plays) | 102 BPM | 🎸 Georges Brassens |
| High-Pressure Glass & Nocturne | 14.7% (23,687 plays) | 103 BPM | 🎸 Georges Brassens |
| Clearing Isobar & Horizon Breeze | 14.1% (22,682 plays) | 106 BPM | 🌿 Tryo |
| Low-Pressure Storm Front | 14.0% (22,439 plays) | 110 BPM | 🎧 Chinese Man |
| Golden Hour Ridge & Twilight | 13.7% (21,942 plays) | 105 BPM | 🌿 Tryo |
| Steady Drizzle & Velvet Mist | 12.8% (20,501 plays) | 104 BPM | 🎧 Chinese Man |
The verdict is statistically indisputable: when the barometer is calm or hazy, I am a Georges Brassens purist; when the breeze clears the horizon, Tryo takes over; and when a low-pressure storm front or steady Belgian drizzle hits the windowpane, it’s Chinese Man trip-hop grooves all evening.
5. Conversational Sonic Assistant & 24-Hour Chronology
Scrolling down the Data Viz dashboard reveals my 24-Hour Chronology—where listening activity climbs steadily through the afternoon before peaking at 19:00 UTC (11,072 plays, 87% activity).
And tucked into the bottom-right corner is the Conversational AI Assistant (with voice and text input), ready to bridge weather telemetry and your catalog on the fly:
- “Take me somewhere it is raining”
- “What does the sky sound like here?”
- “Forge me something for this weather”
Crucially, as the assistant notes: “Anything that changes your library is shown to you first.”
Not bad for forty-eight hours fueled by espresso and two field hockey wins. Feel free to teleport your own barometer to a favorite street-art wall or check out the Python code on GitHub!
Interactive Gallery: Inside Barogroove
Browse the artwork and full-resolution UI screenshots from the weekend build below:
