What’s the most dramatic part of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit? The second verse. Pixies’ Gigantic? The first verse. Mogwai’s Mogwai Fear Satan? The bit about five minutes in when the guitars kick in.

If you’re a fan, you may have known this already, but Spotify claims to have proven it using data. At least, that’s the aim of the latest hack from Paul Lamere, director of developer community for the streaming music service’s Echo Nest division.

Lamere has released the Where is the Drama? web-app after building it during this month’s Music Hack Day Berlin event. It analyses the audio from any song in Spotify’s catalogue to identify its most dramatic section.

“The app grabs the detailed audio analysis for the song from The Echo Nest. This includes a detailed loudness map of the song. This is the data I use to find the drama. To do so, I look for the part of the song with the largest rise in volume over the course of a 30 second window,” Lamere wrote on his blog.

“I give extra weight to crescendos that culminate in louder peaks (so if there are two crescendos that are 20dB in range but one ends at 5dB louder, it will win). Once I identify the most dynamic part of a song, I pad it a bit (so we get to hear a bit of the drop after the build).”

The hack identifies the likely section of drama, then plots it as a “heavily filtered loudness curve” with the relevant section highlighted. Spotify users can then “play the drama”, with Lamere having discovered a way to skip to specific points in songs.

Users can also click a “Stop the Drama” button to stop playing the track, which – this being a hack – switches the music for silence by flipping to John Cage’s 4’33 track. “In other words, to stop playing one track, I just start playing another (that happens to be silent),” wrote Lamere.

“The awesome side effect of this is that I’ll be slowly turning anyone who uses Where’s the Drama? into experimental music listeners as the Spotify recommendation system responds to all of those John Cage ‘plays’. This should win some sort of ‘hackiest hack of the year’ award.”

Spotify is promoting the hack on its own site, pointing fans in the direction of the graphs for the Nirvana, Mogwai and Pixies songs mentioned above, as well as tracks by The Lonely Island, Led Zeppelin, Nero and Guns N’ Roses.

• Music is louder, less acoustic and more energetic than in the 1950s