Maps of Musical Genres

Bumped to the top to highlight  added material.  Originally published in August 2014.

Find it HERE. Click on links to listen to examples.

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1264 genres by The Echo Nest. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.

Courtesy of Glenn McDonald.

Addendum, April 2015: More at this article in Vox, which quotes McDonald:

This map builds on essentially everything else we do at the Echo Nest from parsing the contents of scraped web pages to analyzing the psycho-acoustic properties of the actual audio files…I focus on trying to make sense of data, and extract useful insights from it. Besides genres, I work on similarity calculations, personalization, data quality, sanity-checking, emerging-music discovery, contextual playlist generation, audio analysis and whatever else seems to have the potential to help people experience music.

The identification of genres is, of course, foundational to the study of cultural evolution.