Mapping All Music

If attempts to convert the universe of musical genres and bands into something visually navigable entertain you, here's one:

http://www.furia.com/misc/genremaps/engenremap.html

There's an overview map of the musical genre-space, and individual artist-maps for each genre, with sample illustrative audio for each genre and most bands, and more extensive genre-primer playlists linked on Rdio.

Everything in this is generated algorithmically, which means there are some incongruous bits here and there, but if I tried to do this by hand it would take essentially forever, so it seems like a reasonable trade-off.

(There's a little more background information about the thing here: http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=377.)

Quite something, sir!

this is rad

calypso and salsa chaining off of IDM is kind of weird but i can kind of understand it

I love this, congratulations!

this is fascinating

sexy e.g. Beyonce "Halo"

In the version I have where the genres are placed strictly by data values, with no adjustment for readability, calypso and salsa are in a little clump with highlife, vallenato, boogaloo, mbalax, latin jazz and mambo. IDM belongs up above them a bit, but gets interposed in there due to the math for spacing the names out so they aren't all on top of each other...

This is very cool. What's the underlying data? Is is social or more to do with content? (if that makes sense)

The underlying data is like mountains on top of mountains on top of turtles on top of turtles, and these are some of the patterns that form when the snow falls off the peaks. Some things are cultural/social, some come from audio analysis. Basically everything we do at the Echo Nest is directly or indirectly involved one way or the other.

http://www.furia.com/misc/genremaps/engenremap-juggalo.html

Is the metal cluster pulling shoegaze towards it, or was that just accidental? Not that I disagree that there's a connection, but it's interesting to see it expressed.

Nothing is accidental. It's not a force diagram, so there's no "pulling", precisely, but yeah, I like mentally following the arc from post-metal to shoegaze to dream pop. The non-data distortions are all in the Y axis, and increase as you go down, so the stuff at the top is more precisely positioned than the stuff at the bottom...

i believe it should be "mapping all rovi" now

And if it wasn't obvious, there's a kind of fluctuating definition of "genre" involved. Although I think "Sexy" is probably the only one that has absolutely no real justification.

This is awesome!

Rovi has no Sexy.

or Ninja

If you were refusing to look at this until I added bounce, electro swing and moombahton, it's ready for you now.

this is genius

yeah this is fascinating. love trying to intuit all the relationships and continuities

i'd been wondering where moombahton went

Is there any way you could add a 'search by artist' function? I'd love to be able to look up individual artists and see what they are.

Sad to admit, but I looked for my old band, found it under 'warm drone'

Choral and oratory should get together.

Yeah, I have an artist-lookup thing internally, but it'll be a bit more work to expose it. So not yet!

Oh, MaresNest, which drone band were you in? (Or were you not drone?)

Rothko, I don't know what the hell we were tbh. We got called all sorts of things, I'd have put us next to Labradford I guess.

Was Rothko that group with lots of bassists? They were great!

Yea, for the first 3/4 years it was 3 bassists

Oh, very cool, I was a Rothko fan. I even wrote (short) reviews of A Negative for Francis and Forty Years to Find a Voice. I think you're in fine and basically appropriate company in warm drone.

ty glenn :)

why does the powerviolence cluster resemble a map of south america? why are das oath way of by themselves, a tiny island floating in arctic seas? is there really a band called venomous concept? that's rad.

^ north AND south america tbh, all of them

Continental drift is copying my readability algorithm.

I appreciate the classification of the iPod commercial suspenders bands as "stomp and holler"

no lumineers no credibility

Ah, you're right, I accidentally left "stomp and holler" out of my last update. I just put the more recent map for it up, which does in fact have the Lumineers...

hm, is there an equivalent of electrofunk/post-disco/old school ('old school' in the Zapp & Roger, Patrice Rushin sense) somewhere in there, or is that grouped in with funk?

*Rushen

why is the map for "house" all shitty edm?

(insert obvious joke)

OK, I added post-disco. It has a lot of overlap with funk and disco, and I'd guess that the automated song-selection for it won't do a great job at adhering to the "post" part, but in all of these cases I'm pleased if the cloud of music kind of swirls around in vaguely the right vicinity of the proper aesthetic. These are supposed to be invitations, not circumscriptions. A human with real first-hand knowledge of an individual genre should pretty much always be able to do better than my robots.

As for house, the plain "house" genre is kind of deliberately miscellaneous in both substyle and era. The more specific ones (tech house, chicago house, hard house, etc.) ought to be more coherent.

I also added first attempts at c-pop and chinese traditional today. I don't know enough about those to say how good my versions of them are, but they're definitely Chinese, so that's encouraging.

And chinese indie rock.

Glenn in the Guardian!
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/25/pop-music-louder-less-acoustic

Here's another thing that turns this around into a timeline of sorts:

http://blog.echonest.com/post/68904533303/listen-64-years-of-music-innovation-in-one-playlist

This is fun:

http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/distinctive_artist_map-2.png

What's a J Boog?

http://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/27/favorite-artists-vs-distinctive-artists-by-state/

http://musicmachinery.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/most-ignored-artists-2.png
http://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/28/anti-preferences-in-regional-listening/

hey florida y u no like haim

http://everynoise.com/cities.html

@seandalai, was about to share that myself.

can hawaii be more stereotypical?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6fgVVlPl08

lol

Today Spotify acquired the Echo Nest, where I work on this stuff!

And now the 1000+ ENtro playlists to each genre are available on Spotify, as well. See the links at the bottom of each map page. Like the ENtro to mod revival [http://open.spotify.com/user/glennpmcdonald/playlist/1XRBDaaVvWQpSXQmtf6wZG] or just go straight to the ENtro to everything [http://open.spotify.com/user/glennpmcdonald/playlist/06sRytA5s8zaS6sy9Tni7k].

Article/Interview in PopMatters

i just discovered this, and it is the greatest thing ever