
Musicmap - colinprince
http://musicmap.info/#
======
sdnguyen90
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.

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

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musicmap
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

~~~
rednab
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/](http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/)

²) Hip Hop via Funky Breaks.

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jonnyscholes
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).

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yawgmoth
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.

~~~
popctrl
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!

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Undertow_
I visited a similar thing a while ago
[http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html)

These music guides are really fun to dive into

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

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

~~~
vintermann
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.

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morsch
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.

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

[http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html)

~~~
jboynyc
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](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](https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2016.05.001))

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

[https://familyofrock.net/](https://familyofrock.net/)

~~~
GurnB
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.

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erelde
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...

~~~
quadrangle
Western, English-language pop-music at that.

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codeisawesome
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.

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sjclemmy
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.

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voltagex_
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.

~~~
sjclemmy
Looks like D3.js is used.

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JoeDaDude
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/](http://techno.org/electronic-
music-guide/)

~~~
odabaxok
Also there is the Map of Metal, restricted to metal:
[http://mapofmetal.com/#/home](http://mapofmetal.com/#/home)

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6stringmerc
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!

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Kabootit
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_.

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

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

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

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amelius
Missing the music samples.

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

~~~
tgb
> Missing the music samples.

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

~~~
amelius
Sorry, found them :)

By the way, also missing: afro house, soca

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vixen99
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?

~~~
vintermann
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.

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TomasEkeli
It didn't find Mahler.

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

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quadrangle
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?

