from Hacker News

Musicmap: The genealogy and history of popular music genres

by tcsenpai on 10/14/24, 11:29 AM with 48 comments

• by fullofbees on 10/14/24, 1:17 PM

  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.

• by amadeuspagel on 10/14/24, 11:36 AM

  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/

• by jph on 10/14/24, 1:49 PM

  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/

• by henearkr on 10/14/24, 1:33 PM

  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.

• by excalibur on 10/14/24, 1:18 PM

  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.

• by dang on 10/14/24, 6:45 PM

  Related:

  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)

• by summermusic on 10/14/24, 1:25 PM

  > 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.

• by bsenftner on 10/14/24, 1:49 PM

  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.

• by MSFT_Edging on 10/14/24, 1:36 PM

  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.

• by aanet on 10/14/24, 5:41 PM

  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.

• by fuhsnn on 10/14/24, 2:57 PM

  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.

• by FrustratedMonky on 10/14/24, 2:11 PM

  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.

• by prmoustache on 10/14/24, 1:16 PM

  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.

• by butz on 10/14/24, 3:59 PM

  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?

• by runiq on 10/14/24, 1:50 PM

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

• by blenderob on 10/14/24, 2:15 PM

  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.

• by N-Krause on 10/14/24, 1:13 PM

  [flagged]

• by thanatropism on 10/14/24, 1:37 PM

  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...

• by smcameron on 10/14/24, 1:56 PM

  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

• by rootusrootus on 10/14/24, 2:23 PM

  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.