Scenotopie
A map of genres and aesthetics
A map read, not drawn
Music genres and cultural aesthetics are two vocabularies for the same thing: scenes. A scene is a time, a place and a sensibility, and it leaves the same trace in both vocabularies. Wikipedia describes thousands of music genres; the Aesthetics Wiki describes more than a thousand visual and cultural aesthetics; their articles link to each other constantly, and those links are not random. Gothic rock sits close to Goth, chicha to Chicha art, vaporwave to the liminal spaces it borrowed. Scenotopie reads that link structure at scale, along with the paths real readers take between articles, and draws the map it implies.
Nothing is placed by opinion. 7,201 genres and aesthetics settle into 85 families and, inside them, 315 scenes, on their own, from evidence alone. We then give each family and scene a name and each family a short introduction, and that is the only hand-written layer in the whole atlas.
The map rewards wandering. Zoom into a region you have never heard of, search for a band you love, trace the path between two distant sounds, or let the surprise button choose for you.
How to read the map
A real corner of the map, drawn with its actual colors.
The broadest neighbourhoods. 12 of them, named in big type when you are far out.
A continent of adjacent scenes that trade audiences: metal, hip-hop, the Balkans. 85 plates, each with its own color.
The real unit of the map: a time, a place, a sensibility. The rooms inside a big family, joined to each other by a few bridge links.
Genres are circles, aesthetics are squares. Click anything, or click a name to open its level.
Where the data comes from
- Wikipedia & Wikidata the link fabric read from article text, and the structured backbone: which items are genres, which are aesthetics, who makes what music, and the figures behind each movement
- Aesthetics Wiki the aesthetics themselves: pages, infoboxes and the artists they list
- Wikimedia clickstream how readers actually move between articles, month by month
- Wikimedia pageviews monthly attention for every page, which feeds the trends
- Ten foreign Wikipedias links English Wikipedia cannot see, from French to Korean; 1,463 descriptions translated into English
- MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz & the Cover Art Archive which albums the community files under each genre, how much they are listened to, and their covers
How it is built, in five steps
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Seed on evidence
A page joins the map only with measured links behind it. That rule found Anime and Bollywood on its own, and it keeps junk out.
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Reconcile carefully
When a genre and an aesthetic share a name, like Goth, they stay two dots joined by a namesake link. The music and the look are siblings, not the same thing.
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Weigh the links
A considered mention outweighs a passing one, and a link that crosses from music into aesthetics counts the most, because that crossing is what a scene is.
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Let the families emerge
Community detection finds the 85 families with no seed list and no human sorting, then groups them into 12 regions and splits the big ones into their 315 scenes.
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Gate on reality
Every rebuild is scored against real reader navigation, and ships only if the score holds or improves.
What is computed, what is written
Positions, families, regions, scenes, connections and trends are computed from the sources above. The family names and their one-line introductions are written by us, and they are marked as curated wherever they appear. Every claim in them has been checked against the family's actual members.
Known limits, plainly: the map leans on the English Wikipedia, so anglophone culture is over-represented. Pages that change name drop out of the trends until the next rebuild. And a link graph can only see what people wrote down.