5 ms·

The Landscape of Music

16 points by vorador 17y ago

yan 17y ago
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 http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MovieMap/index.html map of tv: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html and map of books: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html
andrewcooke 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 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-for-music-discovery/ http://visualizingmusic.com/2009/10/22/using-visualizations-...
  - andrewcooke 17y ago
    thanks!
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
The Blues Brothers are between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles?
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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.
zoba 17y ago
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 http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2796/tvmap.png

16 points by vorador 17y ago

yan 17y ago

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 http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MovieMap/index.html map of tv: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/TVMap/index.html and map of books: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/BookMap/index.html

andrewcooke 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 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-for-music-discovery/ http://visualizingmusic.com/2009/10/22/using-visualizations-...
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  thanks!

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

The Blues Brothers are between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles?

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.

zoba 17y ago

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