Musicmap: The genealogy and history of popular music genres | Hacker News Reader

Musicmap: The genealogy and history of popular music genres

musicmap.info

41 pointstcsenpai48 comments

I like how this is visualised (at least aesthetically) and I appreciate the utility of genre in that it creates expectations, but at the same, it sort of reeks of this feigned complete knowledge of music and this obsession with categorising things that cannot be neatly categorised. The techno section has this 'these are the types I've read about on reddit'-ness to it and the metal section... I remember crunkcore but I really dont understand how it could be in such large text.

Yup, categories are useful, but when you obsess too much about them, it starts to look like "pigeonholing". Also, in my experience the most interesting musicians/bands are those that can't be easily categorized...

I'm only familiar with metal genres, but it doesn't look bad. It's way better than Wikipedia, for example. There are no "gimmick" genres like aliencore, and every style mentioned is distinctive, historically important and accepted by me and the people I interact with. The only thing that surprised me is that first wave of black metal is called "extreme metal" here.

If anything, it's not detailed enough. For a long time I was listening almost exclusively to technical death metal, while for example I don't line brutal death metal at all. These subgenres of death metal (and band self-identification) are very different, and yet here they are all lumped into just "death metal", as far as I can see.

I'm not sure about the quality of other sections.

A map to me is something that organizes something spatially, two-dimensionally, like everynoise[1], which I don't really see here.

[1]: https://everynoise.com/

Try the mouse scroll wheel, there's a 2D-map organization but it is a little hard to see.

That's a very cool UI. (Though it flashes terribly for me using the touchpad to scroll.)

A mouse is a small rodent with a tail, which I don't really see here.

Similar to this: https://discoverquickly.com/ but with a different UI (created by Spotify employee's)

If you like music maps and electronic music, there's a great site IMHO called Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music at https://music.ishkur.com/

Last discussed pretty much exactly 1 year ago (3 days away): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919241

The classical music class is almost absent, only present in name and its (many) categories and subcategories are not displayed.

Even none of the things that are coming back to being popular curiosities like microtonality (Sevish...), chromaticism (Jacob Collier...), etc? What a shame.

I’m not sure what the music corpus is.

You can search by artist but even extremely popular acts in their genre won’t be present - Shania Twain, Adele and Charli XCX produce no results.

I'm not clear on what the horizontal width of a category is supposed to represent. Electronic music sure seems to get an awful lot of it. Also the categories given under "world music" seem to ignore a lot of the world.

Musicmap: Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887141 - Jan 2019 (11 comments)

Musicmap - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11827808 - June 2016 (41 comments)

> every genre and subgenre

The introduction section is pretty clear that the goal isn't to catalogue every single genre and subgenre.

Some of my favorite genres of music (hyperpop, deconstructed club, utopian virtual) return zero results.

Folk metal is a massive subgenre that also doesn't seem to be there, although it's actually mentioned in the description for heavy metal.

And for those that listen to lyrics and the philosophic aspect of the artist rather than the sounds used to sell their philosophy, this site is useless.

There is an entire population of "music fans" that listen to the lyrics first, categorize by the philosophic content, and have "playlists" that don't sound like a genre to most people, but are in fact all philosophically similar. The songs don't sound at all alike, but speak to the same issues from the same perspectives.

I would love if someone made such a service. Too busy personally to do it myself.

Missing Jazz manouche, aka Gypsy Jazz.

Django had immense influence in most 20th century guitar players, directly and indirectly. Many of the biggest Jazz guitarists had tracks or even albums dedicated to him.

"World|Other" is doing a lot of heavy lifting . . . "AfroBeat" is a handwave for a continent larger and more populated than the US, Africa by decades deserves its own map of styles.

As always, I feel like visualizations/"maps" like these always tell us more about the author's biases than it does explaining whatever musical categorization they wanted to explain.

At least Ishkur had fun with their descriptions :)

There are biases all over, hard to avoid; but even Fanshawe's problematic African Sanctus had more breadth and depth of Africa than this chart - and where's the Australian indigenous space-age lounge trip-hop FFS .. ;)

Good visualization, and kudos to the author for creating this.

BUT, as others have observed, this vis doesn't make an attempt at comprehensiveness.

One glance at "World Music" categorization is enough to drive home that conclusion. Which is not to say that fault (for lack of better word) is entirely with the visualization, but with the poor ontology itself.

I'd LOVE to see a more comprehensive visualization where WORLD MUSIC has equal weight, with (selfishly) a decent ontology of Hindustani classical music.

Gothic/Industrial is way too far from the Rock chunk, it's closely related and contemporary to New Wave/Post-Punk. The connection can be drawn from The Cure, Joy Division/New Order, Killing Joke etc.

What is the X-Axis? I'm little lost on how the vertical columns were determined. Was it Beats/Min or something like that.

EDIT: This is a great effort. Super complicated multi-variable. Very hard to find any way to display.

It looks to be time, with higher values being older music. You can use your scroll wheel and mouse around and it becomes more apparent

It looks like the Height is age. So y-axis, is age of music.

But the left-right categorization, seems arbitrary. I'm curious if it is just arbitrary, since you have to start somewhere. I looked around and didn't find much help on the overall scheme.

EDIT:

I think the overall columns are a best guess based on this

"The Definition of Genre

The history of Popular Music hardly qualifies as an exact science. It is a retrospective analysis of events that focuses on the underlying forces or common symptoms in the overwhelming production of music records, ignoring nuances and side-effects to grasp a comprehensible structure. This is because (popular) music is far from a static phenomenon: it is a constantly evolving, transforming, giant organism. Almost never has a music genre suddenly emerged as a shocking revolution without any trace or evolution in the past. All of them have naturally evolved, mutated, merged, or become (theoretically) extinct. Only the past can be examined of this natural, organic network."

It's the infinite spectrum of music :) Seriously, no idea - I don't think it's anything you can measure, but it looks like the genres are roughly sorted by their "electronic/acoustic ratio"? And it also looks like the author is listening to too much EDM, as that is given wayyyyyyy too much space compared to all the other genres (IMHO)...

I never understood that need to categorize at such a detailed level.

Same is happening in the bicycle world. Now your road bike that you also take on dirt roads should be called a gravel bike, but then we need to make distinctions with gravel racing bikes, gravel bikepacking bikes, adventure bikes and they will soon make the distinction between rigid, hardtail and fully suspended gravel bikes regular or flat-bar gravel bike, the same way they split MTB to cross country, downcountry, trail, all-mountain, enduro, dh, freeride, fatbike and whatever I am missing. This is ridiculous. The irony is an aero road bike designed for pure speed on the road today can accept wider tires (up to 32mm wide) than what was considered fit enough for riding dirt roads 20 years ago (25-28mm), so they should be also called gravel bike in a way. Just call them bikes FFS.

Because everyone tells new businesses to “find and/or create a niche!”

That's true, but I think music genres can be very tribal.

At some point it just descends into fashion.

I remember a quote I read that said there are really only two genres; things you like, and things you don't.

Feels a bit unfair to compare art to bikes.

Genres in music aren't just about splitting hairs—they're about expression, identity, and connection. Just like how "gravel bikepacking bike" tells you what experience someone is after, music genres help people find the sound they're seeking. Yeah, sometimes labels do get excessive, but they help us share and understand each other better.

Categorization, or ontology, is a fundamental human activity that can be applied to pretty much any field or niche. I often think of chemistry in this context: there's a big chunk of it that is about classifying substances and systematic nomenclature. The name of compound alone conveys a ton of information!

By naming things, we unlock all sorts of superpowers for studying, remixing, remembering, sharing knowledge, and creating derived stuff.

However! I confess I was sharing your sentiment... In my case I think it is a reaction to how we are constantly bombarded by algorithmically chosen content these days. There’s something beautiful about organic discovery, even if it means you won't be exposed to EVERYTHING that you MAY ever enjoy.

I read an article by Rhiannon Gibbons, which suggested that music was primarily regional until the 20th century, and that the taxonomy of genres emerged alongside the nationwide distribution of recorded music, which is of course worldwide now.

Likewise, my bike is regional -- it's thrown together from what I've found in my neighbors' trash. Most non-sportive riders use the bike categories to narrow down their choices in search of a bike that's comfortable, practical, and at least moderately stylish. In the early years of mass produced "mountain bikes," most MTB's were purchased for use on pavement. People liked them because they looked like they'd be sturdy and comfortable. It helped that MTB's were also most people's first introduction to indexed shifting and aluminum wheels.

Sorry, but forcing cookies upon user and not providing service otherwise is against the law, at least in EU. Why not boot all EU users to some random website too?

I'm not sure I can take this seriously without a direct reference to https://xkcd.com/1095.

The first thing I notice is a large cookie popup. When I click "Decline", it takes me to www.google.com. It is a bit irksome because I didn't want to visit www.google.com. Yet this website somehow decided that I must visit www.google.com if I choose to decline their cookie popup.

Can we not add such weird patterns to websites please? I won't go as far as saying that this is user hostile but it does leave a bad taste! It is better to blank the page than redirect me to another website I never wanted to visit.

[flagged]

When declining the cookies sent me away from the website, I decided it wasn't worth my time anyway. What an extremely hostile user experience for such a seemingly innocuous website.

I like it. It's honest and direct to the point. They don't owe us anything.

I don't understand why it has to redirect me to www.google.com though when I decline the cookie. Should an honest website redirect me to the website of a megacorporation when I decline the cookie banner?

In the EU under GDPR, users must be given a genuine choice, meaning they should be able to refuse consent without facing negative consequences such as being redirected or denied access to the service. Creating the illusion of choice by asking for consent and then redirecting users to another site if they decline is a violation of the principles of transparency, fairness, and freely given consent outlined in the GDPR.

> should be able to refuse consent without facing negative consequences such as being redirected

I doubt anyone is forced to allow access per the GDPR.

That's likely not the point. The point as I read it is that if this is in any way targeted at EU users, then it is clearly in breach of GDPR.

the fact that doubleclick.net shows up in the requests is incredibly telling. the page doesnt even work for me with ublock origin and strick tracking protection in firefox. is this related to all the social media links on the page? is the page just refusing to work because ads wont load?

id love to read whatever youre reading, but its not even rendering/available, presumably because of adblocking breaking the site.

This ain't it, chief.

> Jazz is music performed by an ensemble of players, each (very) specialized and proficient in their respective instrument.

So wait, a duet with Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy, the latter of which also plays the flute and many more wind instruments is...

From the description of Thrash Metal:

> Besides aggressive, low-frequency riffs (which are sometimes fittingly described as “shredding”),

That's definitely not what "shredding" means. An example of "shredding": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG1qLxCGLMA

Well that was quick. Decline cookies, get sent away from the site. That is one way to tell me not to come back, and it worked.

for sites like that temporary-containers[1] is the way I go

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/temporary-contai...

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