
The Landscape of Music - vorador
http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MusicMap/index.html
======
zoba
Found a bug/easter egg: If you zoom all the way out and center Elton John at
the top of your screen, then zoom in to the middle zoom level, you can see a
map for TV shows as well.

<http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2796/tvmap.png>

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yan
Looks awesome. Seems to be sourced from Last.fm.

Also, don't miss:

map of movies: <http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MovieMap/index.html>

map of tv: <http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html>

and map of books: <http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html>

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andrewcooke
any idea how the relationships are inferred?

[i've used last fm's artist tags to construct relationships between artists
(artists with tags in common are related) and so generate playlists that of
related tracks - the last fm api is really easy to use.]

~~~
repeatingbeats
My first guess was that they used the artist.getSimilar API method. I dug
around a little and found this:

"In April 2009, we crawled the website [last.fm] by starting with Beethoven,
and the top 20 musicians most similar to Beethoven, provided that each has at
least 100,000 listeners. We then found the top 20 most similar musicians to
each of those with at least 100,000 listeners and proceed recursively. Our
crawl yielded a graph with 2782 musicians, with edge weights the similarity
between musicians."

\- Emden Gansner, Yifan Hu, Stephen Kobourov and Chris Volinsky, Putting
Recommendations on the Map - Visualizing Clusters and Relations:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5286>

On an semi-related note, there is a wealth of information on visualizing music
in the slide deck here: [http://visualizingmusic.com/2009/10/22/using-
visualizations-...](http://visualizingmusic.com/2009/10/22/using-
visualizations-for-music-discovery/)

~~~
andrewcooke
thanks!

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RiderOfGiraffes
The Blues Brothers are between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles?

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RiderOfGiraffes
Pretty much the only thing I don't like about Hacker News: the drive-by
shootings. This was a serious comment, although clearly I need to expand on
it.

Somehow this map has put The Blues Brothers between Frank Sinatra and The
Beatles. To me that's just ridiculous, and a clear indication that their
"similarity" algorithm is seriously broken.

They don't seem to explain it either. They talk about their recursive
technique for starting from one point and fanning out, but they magically talk
about "similarity" without giving any definition or indication of how they
compute it.

Personally, I write dozens of programs every week to explore data, and I look
at the result for stand-out stupidities. To me, this is one, and it says that
the algorithms need to be checked.

~~~
repeatingbeats
I don't really have any intuition as to where the The Blues Brothers should
lie on this type of map, so maybe you could explain why you think their
placement is so ridiculous?

The similarity algorithm appears to be taken directly from last.fm, which uses
some kind of collaborative filtering method on user listening stats to
determine artist similarity.

In general, I think this map does a good job of grouping similar artists.
Mapping a high dimensional similarity space down to two dimensions is
undoubtedly going to result in a few data points that seem out of place,
particularly when dealing with content like artist similarity where individual
perceptions can vary drastically.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I don't know where they should go on this type of map, but I do know that
there's not much in common between The Blues Brothers and Frank Sinatra, or
The Blues Brothers and The Beatles. Just listening to the music suggests
there's not much in common. Any algorithm that suggests there is is, to my
mind, suspect.

I don't know much, indeed, anything, about most of the bands/artists on this
map, so I'm not going to suggest any rearrangement, but I'd be interested to
see this concept of "similarity".

Actually, I probably wouldn't be interested, but I hereby announce my position
as a skeptic.

~~~
stan_rogers
As a musician (one who, admittedly, wound up owing money when the bar tab was
subtracted from the gate) I can't think of a better place to put them. They
actually live on a line just south of the Sinatra-Beatles meridian. If you
look just southwest of Sinatra, you'll see that Cab Calloway lives on the true
line, with Count Basie just to the left. This would be the "dirty", less
polished, and less, well, white version of the Sinatra-Beatles line (which
would probably extend westward to Paul Whiteman if he appeared on the map at
all).

No, the one that puzzles me is Sarah Brightman. I can understand them trying
to keep her away from the cool kids, but she's got to be feeling like she got
off the bus in the wrong neighborhood.

The style of music the Blues Brothers played, the Stax sound, cuts the
continuum running from jazz-influenced big band risqué pop to straight-ahead
risqué rock and roll. The rhythm section is from the rock world -- electric
bass, guitar and piano, with foursquare beat-keeping drumming (as opposed to
the sort of thing that, say, a Buddy Rich would do) -- the vocal performances
are clearly in the Calloway-Prima-Charles lineage, and the horns are pure big
band pop.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Hmm.

OK, I'll go and listen to some more and try to hear the similarities and
connections you make. Thanks for taking the time and effort to explain -
'preciate it.

