The Landscape of Music

http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MusicMap/index.html

by vorador • 17 years ago

16 13 17 years ago

www2.research.att.com

yan• 17 years 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

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

andrewcooke2• 17 years 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.]

repeatingbeats2• 17 years 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

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-...

andrewcooke2• 17 years ago

thanks!

RiderOfGiraffes4• 17 years ago

The Blues Brothers are between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles?

RiderOfGiraffes4• 17 years 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.

repeatingbeats2• 17 years 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.

zikzikzik• 17 years ago

What's more interesting is the bands missing from the map. Do the missing bands (NIN, for example) form an isolated "island" in the last.fm similarity graph?

pohl• 17 years ago

It may help to understand the difference between lastfm and pandora. It is the latter that deals in musical similarity. The former is based on social network, as in people who listen to X are likely to listen to Y. This could explain nearness of disimilar artists.

zoba• 17 years 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

The Landscape of Music

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