HOTGAME: A corpus of early HOuse and Techno music from Germany and AMErica

HOTGAME, is a corpus of recording studio features extracted from HOuse and Techno music from Germany and AMErica until 1994. In the corpus, 4,667 German tracks from 97 dance music labels and 4,362 US-American tracks from 85 record labels are included. The music was stored as (lossly) compressed stereo audio files with a sample rate of 44,100 Hz.

Inclusion in the HOTGAME corpus followed several rules:

• Only Music between 1984 and 1994 is included
• Ancestors of House and Techno – like (Italy) Disco, Industrial, and Electropop – are not included
• Music genres that evolved in parallel with House and Techno – such as Electronic Body Music (EBM), High-NRG, Dark Wave, New Wave, Neue Deutschew Welle, Synth-Pop – are not included
• Music with stronger influences from other genres – such as Electro Funk, Freestyle, Miami Bass, and Indie Electro – are not included
• Descendants of House and Techno – such as Hip House, Eurodance, Trance, Acid, Hardcore and Gabber – are included
• Artists are assigned to the nation in which they were raised

HOTGAME consists of CSV files that contain 21 recording studio features. The features were extracted from non-overlapping time frames of 2,048 samples, i.e., every 50 ms. The only exception are the BPM (Beats Per Minute), which are extracted once for each track. The files are named according to the following convention:

• artist - title (version) (year).format.csv

The year refers to the release year of the record (in rare cases re-releases). They are stored in the sub-folders germany and usa, which can be found in techno-csv.zip. The source code for the feature extraction is provided on Github in the repository link.

The purpose of HOTGAME is to enable researchers to study the development of early house and techno music in the United States of America and Germany from an objective, content-based viewpoint, i.e., the music itself. With over 9,000 tracks, big data methods, such as inferential statistical analysis and machine learning, are appropriate. Such analyses can validate statements, narratives, and conclusions made by time witnesses that can be found in documentaries, biographies, and qualitative studies of electronic dance music, electronica, etc.

HOTGAME does not contain any audio material.

Citation

When you use the data set, please cite the respective paper:

Ziemer, Tim, HOTGAME: A Corpus of Early House and Techno Music from Germany and America, Metrics 2025, 2(2): 8, https://doi.org/10.3390/metrics2020008

Some analyses of the HOTGAME corpus are:

Ziemer, Tim, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and Recording Studio Features for the Analysis of Producer-Driven Music, preprints.org 2026, https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202603.0656.v1

Ziemer, Tim and Linke, Simon, From Imitation to Innovation: The Divergent Paths of Techno in Germany and the USA, arXiv preprint 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.04222

The recording studio features are explained in my previous papers:

Ziemer, Tim, Kudakov, Nikita and Reuter, Christoph, Producer vs. Rapper: Who Dominates the Hip Hop Sound?, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 73 (1/2), 2024, https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2022.0183, pp. 54-62

Ziemer,Tim, Kiattipadungkul, Pattararat and Karuchit, Tanyarin, Acoustic features from the recording studio for Music Information Retrieval Tasks, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 42(1) 2020, paper number 035004, https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001363

Ziemer, Tim, Goniometers are a Powerful Acoustic Feature for Music Information Retrieval Tasks, DAGA 2023 - 49. Jahrestagung für Akustik, 2023, https://pub.dega-akustik.de/DAGA_2023/data/articles/000600.pdf, pp.934-937