Scenotopie
A map of genres and aesthetics
A map derived from real connections
Music genres and cultural aesthetics are two angles of the same thing: scenes. A scene is a time, a place and a sensibility, with a certain artstyle and lifestyle. 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. We analyze this open data, looking at the paths readers take between articles, and made the the map it implies.
Nothing is placed at random or by opinion. 7,201 genres and aesthetics are clustered into 85 families by their relationships and, inside them, 315 scenes. We then give each family and scene a name and each family a short introduction; that is the hand-written layer. The short album notes, the scene introductions and the translated descriptions are machine-written from the sources, the album and artist selections for each scene are machine-chosen from community-tagged pools, and everything else is computed.
I recommend wandering in the collection. 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 do its magic! On pages dedicated to specific scenes, we try to gather the albums and visuals that defined this scene, so you can get a feel for it in one glance. Trends are monthly extract showing hightlights and rising scenes of the moment. I hope to make this place more and more interesting by trying to capture what makes each scene unique!
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
Licensing
Text excerpts from Wikipedia are reproduced under CC BY-SA 4.0, and excerpts from the Aesthetics Wiki under CC BY-SA 3.0. We shorten them, sometimes translate them, and every page links back to its source article; the reproduced text remains under those licenses.
Wikidata, the Wikimedia clickstream and pageviews datasets, ListenBrainz and the MusicBrainz core data are published as CC0. The community genre tags that pick each shelf's albums come from MusicBrainz under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0; this site is non-commercial.
Album covers are copyrighted by their respective owners and shown as small identification thumbnails, via the Cover Art Archive. Moodboard images are uploads from the Aesthetics Wiki and Wikimedia; rights remain with their owners, and each image links back to where it lives. If you own the rights to an image shown here and want it removed, write to theo.raduszynski@wota.co.jp and it will come down promptly.
The play buttons on album shelves stream 30-second previews courtesy of Apple Music, resolved in your browser at the moment you press play and never stored; some albums open Apple's own embedded player instead. Nothing is requested from Apple before you press play, no audio is hosted here, and the recordings and marks belong to Apple and the rights holders. Each playing album links to its page on Apple Music.
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. This finds actual genres and aesthethics and leaves most unrelated stuff.
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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 not exactly the same, but are closely linked.
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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 or human sorting, then groups them into 12 regions and splits the big ones into their 315 scenes.
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Validate on reality
We then evaluated the map based on the few scenes we knew, the scoring seemed intuitively fine. Metrics of that quantify how much scenes mix music and aesthetics were also used to improve our representations. We are still working on improving the system, and regular updates will incorporate new pages and links to enrich the atlas.