That reminds me of a methodology @tutschku showed in early FluCoMa stuff over in this thread (sadly his original vids are no longer available).
If memory serves me right he had an automated thing where he would pick a sound (don’t remember how, if it was 2d grid or via distance to an input sound) and then the playback engine would quickly play back the nearest n amount of them, with the idea being that you could get a sense of what was matching better.
Actually looks like my vid is still up which was mirroring his:
