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Musicmap

musicmap.info

158 pointscolinprince41 comments

Pretty in depth to my knowledge. I follow lots of odd genres and was surprised to see many of them on there. With that being said, I do feel like the Rap section is not that detailed. It looks like detail is a goal here so I'll give my 2 cents.

1. Miami Bass & Bounce

All the songs in this playlist are Miami bass songs. There are no bounce songs. At least add The Showboys - Drag Rap on there.

2. Southern Rap & Crunk

You can't roll this up all into 1 section IMO. To make this point, there is not a single Cash Money Records/No Limit Records song in the playlist. If you don't think they deserve their own tree, look at their record sales. I would argue that the descendent tree (Trap), is more influenced Cash Money and No Limit than crunk.

N.E.R.D. - Lapdance is in the playlist. I think this is a big stretch. Yes, I know Virginia is technically in the South but their sound is nothing close to it.

3. Grime (listed with Breakbeat Garage)

This deserves its own tree. Grime has been starting to gain major traction outside of the UK as of late. Also, current day Grime is heavily influenced by trap/drill.

and 1 minor nitpick not rap related - Juke(ghetto house, ghetto tech) is influenced by Jungle. You'll hear sped up breaks in quite a few of DJ Rashad's songs.

I also expected to see Grime on its own tree, or perhaps I expected to find it somewhere under Rap genres or Jamaican.

I was a bit surprised to find musicmap here before I actually posted it. (I was going to post it today). Just a few clarifications:

- the site is not optimal for smartphones, web responsiveness is great for ipad and beyond (preferably chrome/firefox) - more updates will follow, like spotify playlists and hyperlinks in the text (+ small user friendly improvements) - take note that this is a starting platform, and an approximation of the overwhelming reality of music genres. Please read the first three (general) pages for more information. All feedback is appreciated at info@musicmap.info

Thank you sincerely for posting this here before I did :-)

My regards,

Kwinten

musicmap.info

It took me a second to realize I could use the scroll wheel to zoom in but very nice and, as others have mentioned, surprisingly in-depth with a huge selection of lesser-known genres.

While I think dividing music in genres will always have an element of personal opinion in it, I will have to say that Ishkur's Guide To Electronic Music¹) disagrees with you quite a bit on some of the timelines and relationships in the Electronic Music/EDM corner.

And in the very least, his take on where Chemical Breaks/Big Beat came from²) seems a lot more plausible to me.

¹) Contains Flash: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

²) Hip Hop via Funky Breaks.

Sending feedback for a tiny usability issue. Your project is very cool, thanks!

Minor issues:

* Rap > East Coast > "Jay-Z - 99 Problems" video has been DMCAed and can't be viewed

* Rap > East Coast > "NAS – If I Ruled the World" video is "Unavailable in your country" (US) and can't be viewed

Awesome stuff - and silky smooth! Minor crit - took me a bit to pick up that I could zoom (didnt notice the +/- in the bottom right - I thought the entirety of the interaction was clicking on the large shapes and getting the information overlay).

Love it. I built a way simpler thing years ago that would let users tag an artist/album/song and then weight the tag {-x, x}. Then you can try to figure out how close two nodes are to give recommendations.

The metal subgenres are from Wikipedia, and depending on your perspective, some of those aren't real genres. 'Classic metal' and 'Symphonic & Gothic Metal'... Symphonic is a descriptor that can be applied to any genre. For example, there's symphonic power metal and symphonic black metal. Same goes with Viking metal. Progressive, however, is both a genre and a descriptor. Dream Theater and Haken are 'progressive metal' bands, but you can also have a band like Atheist, which is a progressive death metal band.

Taxonomy, especially of music, is a really difficult thing to do. You have orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist ways of classifying things. I personally think it's most convenient to use post-revisionist buckets and give orthodox classification through history blurbs/slugs on an artist/album/song. An example - Slayer is a thrash metal band. But at the time, a lot of people would have called them a black metal band. That's because when Show No Mercy was released, black metal was an aesthetic and subject matter, not a sound. So in this map I'd place them under thrash and clarify the dispute.

My top-down perspective is: black metal, death metal, thrash metal, power metal, doom metal, heavy metal. 'Glam metal and hair metal' belong under rock genres. Those 60s/70s hard rock bands (e.g. Sir Lord Baltimore, Blue Cheer) that Wikipedia calls 'classic metal', are just hard rock. Metalcore, deathcore, crossover, crust, grindcore, are interesting cases as well. Metalcore is, arguably, death metal -> melodic death metal + []hardcore. Hardcore being under punk. If you place it under metal overall, people will complain that it's really punk-based. If you place it under punk, you'll get the complaint that it's so influenced by metal that it shouldn't be. Similar problems in taxonomy arise in a lot of modern black metal bands because post-rock has influenced many greatly.

Anyway, very cool site, one day I'll be a librarian.

In regards to hardcore, I think it should be placed on the border between metal and punk, much like crossover.

Also Black Metal's strongest ancestor is arguably crust & d-beat, which is not shown (And crust/d-beat falls on the line along with hardcore)

But go to a hardcore show and it will be pretty clear who the metal kids are and who the crusties are!

I visited a similar thing a while ago http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

These music guides are really fun to dive into

This is even better. Too bad it doesn't open music on YouTube because Spotify doesn't work everywhere.

I'm surprised Chiptune falls into the "Downtempo" category. Chiptune music tends to be upbeat.

Very true. The best unifying characteristic of that group is "music which critics have traditionally sneered at". Many of the genre labels in it are labels which were critic/industry-imposed, and were disliked or rejected by almost all the artists it was applied to - "New age" and "easy listening" in particular.

The author(s) of this page doesn't quite subscribe to those condescending attitudes it seems, but they inherit the framework from those who did.

Overall, in all the genres, the project reveals its biases by having extremely variable resolution. It's not a bad project as such, it's probably as fair as any such project can hope to be - but that's why we rather need quantitative approaches. Echonest's "Every noise at once", everynoise.com is a good example of that.

Wow, this is incredible. Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music completely blew my mind back in the day, and it keeps doing the same when I revisit it every couple of years.

Some feedback which you are free to ignore:

When zoomed in, the map tends to look kind of cluttered, a mess of graph edges. Some genres such as jazz are okay, but the rock/metal and electronic music area is almost comical. It's much better when hovering over a single sub-genre; I'd keep the highlighting in place after clicking on it. For the non-highlighted view, I don't know.

The time reference adds even more horizontal lines, even though the corresponding decade labels almost never visible; I'd drop the lines and make the decade label stick to the edge of the screen. BTW, I love that the user can chose which layers to display.

The left and right side panels cover up two thirds of the map. By default, they both open as you navigate to an item; it felt kind of claustrophobic to me. Maybe the Genre information can be an additional "row" in the right hand panel? I think that could work well. Other ideas: less whitespaces, less opacity?

I closed the left hand panel, and then it took me a long time to figure out how to get it back; I assumed there was a bug because it didn't have the expand button the right side does.

When I dig into an individual genre, I like to read the sub-genre descriptions while listening to the various music samples. Having to switch between description and playlist mode (one replaces the other with a long-ish animation) gets really old.

Maybe clicking on genres/sub-genres should move the map viewport? I just noticed that clicking on the year in the sub-genre description move the viewport to the sub-genre (not the year, per se). So that's good, if non-obvious.

All that said, I'm looking forward to digging into the content; exploring music in this way is such a fun way to broaden your horizon. And I'm really looking forward to what you'll be doing with the Spotify integration! Spotify should pay you a shit-ton of money to integrate this into their apps.

Anybody interested in this would also be interested in the amazing work of Glenn Mcdonald:

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

There's a lot of promising work ongoing exploring emergent music genres. Just recently, two scholarly articles came out in the same week: "Genre Complexes in Popular Music" in PLoS ONE, looking at MySpace (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155471), and "Follow the Algorithm: An Exploratory Investigation of Music on YouTube" in Poetics (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2016.05.001)

If you like this, you should certainly pick up a copy of Pete Frame's hand drawn Complete Rock Family Trees:

https://familyofrock.net/

These are all so frustratingly small that I can't make out what they actually are. Looks like a huge amount of text under the band names but what could it possibly say?

Pete Frame's book are very fun to read. Good luck finding them. My first introduction to Pete's work was from a poster that was included in a Paul McCartney Box set for Flowers In The Dirt.

It's a glossary of pop music, not 'music'. I don't mean that as snidy. But there isn't 'formal music' and 'classical' is only an unclickable bubble...

Western, English-language pop-music at that.

My mind is blown! Thanks for completing what must have been an exhausting amount of research and analysis (and UX design). I wanted this to exist bad enough that I was going to try and create it - but amazing to know that it took 7 years to achieve! Now I'm kind of glad I didn't start down that path :D Will always be cherished, thanks.

Great work!

I love this sort of stuff - Reminds me of the chart in that Jack Black film (School of Rock) that sub divides all the bands into genres and sub-genres.

Minor bug - I tried to search for Hüsker Dü and Husker Du and neither showed up - but they appear in the Post-Hardcore Playlist.

How is a UI like this put together? It seems so far beyond my skills but it must be able to be broken down into components / steps.

Looks like D3.js is used.

Certainly not in the same league as this, and restricted to only recent electronic music, there is Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Also there is the Map of Metal, restricted to metal: http://mapofmetal.com/#/home

Very attractive interface and in my opinion does well to set up the content. Easy click through. And, on the matter of content, this is really a nice tool. Hoping it can continue to grow and have its own editorial voice. Nothin' wrong with that!

This is out of control awesome on so many levels. Data and relationships presented in a way that I want to explore, explore, explore. Way beyond "Oh, that's cute" and moving on.

mind blown.

i always enjoyed ishkurs guide to electronic music which seems a lot more detailed in some corners (see http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/)

This kind of visualization could be a good addition to YouTube. I am sure Google could do it.

Great site, but on iPhone 6's Safari it looks a little broken and works _quite_ slow.

Missing the music samples.

Also, it seems this map is lacking in the world+classical departments.

> Missing the music samples.

Are you looking for something other than the playlists that each (sub)genre has?

Sorry, found them :)

By the way, also missing: afro house, soca

How feasible is it (maybe it's been done) to provide an objective musical analysis of this overwhelming (to me) array of musical styles? By this I mean - descriptive of the harmonic progressions and rhythmic patterns employed as one would analyze (for instance) a classical symphony?

There's a lot of informal analysis like this on the internet, but it usually looks as "how to write %genre_name%" guide. Of course, they aren't as good as real academic analysis, but they're usually good enough for most purposes and much easier to follow.

everynoise.com does something like that.

They don't describe their methodology in detail, but they use some sort of feature extractors to assign positions to genres (as some people have define them through song inclusion/exclusion) in a multidimensional space.

I believe they use some form of PCA, so the axes aren't so easy to put names on, but it does give some indication of actual variation.

It didn't find Mahler.

Nice work, seems to be lots of good info from what I can see and judge.

I don't quite get it. Music is an amalgam of features, not in boxes. The real solution is tags, not genres even really. Any given piece could get a whole bunch of tags. Why attempts to put everything in one place on a map?

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