finding music with pictures: using visualization for discovery

Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery

Paul Lamere #musicvizThe Echo Nest

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Music Discovery Challenge

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Music Discovery Challenge

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Listener Study

Listeners 5,000

Average Songs Per User 3,500

Percent of songs never listened to 65%

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Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Dance Music

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Why Visualize?

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Visualizations can engage our pattern-matching brain

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Human rendered visualizations

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Visualizations as a tree

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71939

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The greatest visualization ever?

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Visualizations as a Map

9Dorian Lynskey - The Guardian

Section:GDN RR PaGe:8 Edition Date:060203 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 1/2/2006 20:06 cYanmaGentaYellowblack

The Guardian | Friday February 3 2006 98 The Guardian | Friday February 3 2006

Cover story

Going underground

Could we chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map? Dorian Lynskey explains how a box of coloured crayons and a lot of swearing helped

It seems like a deeply implausibleproject: to plot the history of 20thcentury music on the LondonUnderground map devised byHarry Beck in 1933. Artist SimonPatterson transformed the tube

map into a constellation of famousnames in his 1992 work The Great Bear,but he didn’t have to make them all linkup. It is, after all, a tall order to find asaint who was also a comedian. But forthis one to work every interchange hadto be logical in the context of musicalhistory, an unlikely prospect.

I started out with a packet of colouredcrayons, four sheets of A4 taped to-gether and a big box of doubt, but thedifferent character of each line quicklylent itself to a certain genre. Pop inter-sects with everything else, so that had tobe the Circle Line; classical music for themost part occupies its own sphere,which made it perfect for the DocklandsLight Railway. There were a couple offalse starts but by the end of one after-noon I had assigned genres to almost allthe lines and thrashed out most of themajor intersections. The key stationsnaturally went to the most eclecticartists, not necessarily the most impor-tant: the Beatles may be more signifi-cant than Beck but even their most de-voted fan must admit that they nevertried rapping.

The system thus in place, the nextcouple of days were devoted to writingnames in, scribbling them out (sorry,Doug E Fresh and Lynyrd Skynyrd), ago-nising over certain omissions, askingclassical music critic Tom Service for in-valuable help with the DLR, and swear-ing just a little bit. Amazingly, therewere no calamitous blind alleys. It justseemed to make sense.

I tried as far as possible to be objec-tive. Some bands I cannot stand are inhere, while some that I love dearlyaren’t. I also followed chronology wher-ever the path of the line allowed it. Eachbranch line represents a sub-genre: rocksprouts off into grunge and psychedeliawhen it reaches South-West London;hip-hop diverges, north of Camden, intoold school and New York rap. If I was re-ally lucky, the band name echoed theoriginal station name: Highbury & Is-lington became Sly & the Family Stone.

Pedants, of course, will find flaws.Musical influences are so labyrinthinethat any simple equation will be imper-fect. Where, for example, does pop stopand rock begin? How can you draw a de-cisive line between soul and funk? Theseare problems that have plagued recordshop proprietors for decades and they’renot going to be solved here. But I thinkall of these choices are justifiable giventhe limitations of the form.

Other people will quibble with omis-sions – it’s a shame, for example, thatthe Circle Line constantly runs in tan-dem with either the District or Metro-politan lines, thus leaving no room forpure pop acts such as Kylie Minogue andthe Pet Shop Boys. I should also pointout that, to keep my head from explod-ing, I limited the remit to western, pre-dominately Anglo-American music.Then there are those changes necessi-tated by London Underground’s under-standable sensitivity to explosive refer-ences: arrividerci, Massive Attack. Forsome reason, they also took exception tothe late rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

But this is not some definitive historyof music. It’s an experiment to see if oneintricate network can be overlaid on acompletely different one. The eleganceand logic of Harry Beck’s design – itscombination of bustling intersections,sprawling tributaries, long, slanting tan-gents and abrupt dead ends, all suckedinto the overturned wine bottle of theCircle Line – seems to spark other con-nections and appeal to the brain’s innatedesire for patterning and structure. Plusit’s fun, as any piece of music journalismcreated with coloured crayons shouldbe. I hope you like it.

Tell us what you think of the map atwww.guardian.co.uk/artsBuy the map atwww.ltmuseumshop.co.ukSpecial thanks to Chris Townsend atTransport for London and AndrewJones at London Underground.

Music History as a London Tube Map

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