December 16, 2025
When the rave starts talking
Show HN: Search the lyrics of 500 HÖR Berlin techno sets
Techno gets words: ravers ask 'why?' while others love the chaos
TLDR: A dev built a browser-based tool to search auto-generated captions across 500 HÖR Berlin techno sets. The crowd is split: purists scoff at hunting words in techno, while others revel in the chaos and even found “house music,” with extra buzz around the tiny, fast in-browser build.
Hacker News just got a rave upgrade: someone dropped a prototype search engine that lets you look up lyrics across around 500 sets from HÖR Berlin. The twist? These “lyrics” come from YouTube’s auto-captions, which famously mishear everything, especially non‑English lines. Cue instant drama. One skeptic shook the room: “who searches techno music for lyrics?” Meanwhile, a cheerleader labeled it “the most unhinged possible channel… love it!”, and another joyfully typed “house music” and—plot twist—actually found house music. Ravers vs word nerds: fight!
The comedy kept rolling. A commenter begged for a search that finds the sample that goes “bleep‑brrr‑whoosh”—because techno “lyrics” are basically sound effects. Others were stunned it’s all in‑browser, whispering “only 8 MB?” like it’s a magic trick that fits in a pocket. The developer warns the captions are wrong a lot, which means glorious mondegreens (misheard lyrics) and accidental poetry in your search results. The community vibe? Half “why put subtitles on a fog machine,” half “this is chaotic genius.” It’s unaffiliated with HÖR, just a playful proof of concept, but it’s got everyone asking: is techno meant to talk, or should it just make you feel? Either way, the comments are dancing.
Key Points
- •A prototype search engine indexes roughly 500 HÖR Berlin YouTube videos for lyric searches.
- •It uses YouTube’s automatically generated subtitles as the searchable text.
- •The captions may be highly inaccurate, especially for non-English words due to speech recognition errors.
- •The project is unaffiliated with HÖR Berlin.
- •The creator invites users to contact them with questions or comments.