Live Charting Lyrics with “Hey Jude”

LucidChart.com gives a clever example of “live charting”: the process of diagramming a flow chart in time.   The given example diagrams the lyrics from “Hey Jude”.  It’s clearly a commercial, but it’s still a nice little demo.   It’s unclear if the author is the same person who did the original static diagram, I couldn’t find the original version online, only the linked page referencing it.  It’s interesting how the lyrics to certain pop songs can often be described so succinctly.

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Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names

Pop Chart Lab gives a great taxonomy of rap performer names [higher res version].  While honorific titles such as Lady Sovereign, or Sir Mix-a-lot are unsurprisingly common, it’s interesting to see such proliferation of gustatorial references, cartoon characters, and for lack of a better label “guys named Rob”.

If you’re looking for more like this, check out the taxonomy of heavy metal band names archived at Duke Listens!.

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The 1930’s Night-Club Map of Harlem

Drawn in 1932 by E. Simms Campbell, this map  describes the late night entertainment options available in Harlem in the early 30’s, with a special emphasis on music.  Even though the map itself is loosely organized around the city blocks of Lenox and Seventh, the illustrations of musical style are not necessarily constrained by exact geographic location.  The map goes to great lengths to express the culture of the Harlem music club scene; from the performers, to the dress, to the dancing, to the lingo, and even to the food.  It’s a fantastic way to get a sense of the music for that neighborhood at that point in time, but more importantly to get a sense of the culture surrounding it.  The full resolution version is available here.

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Alberto Antoniazza : Rock and Roll Tube Map

Alberto Antoniazza provides another well designed entry in the surprisingly popular “tube map of rock music” category.

He has a flickr page up with the full size version.

If you’re interested in the other tube map based rock maps, you can check out Dorian Lynskey’s map for sale at the London Transport Museum Shop (I think Paul had that one on his wall at some point.)  Also worth checking out is the Last.fm tube tags project that was covered here previously.

Ward Shelley : Visualizing Frank Zappa and Rock Genres

Ward Shelly shares with us a wonderful hand painted rendition of the life and music of Frank Zappa.  From his bio page:

Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.

Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these is the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, recently published in Bomb Magazine.

He also has a great infographic of various rock genres:

In fact, he has a number of wonderfully realized visualizations covering various art figures and movements from Andy Warhol to Avant Garde.  You can access and view the entire list from this page.

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Using Visualizations for Music Discovery

Hot of the presses, here are the sides for the tutorial that Justin and Paul are presenting at ISMIR 2009 on October 26.

Note that the live presentation will include many demonstrations and videos of visualizations that just are not practical to include in a PDF.  If you have the chance, be sure to check out the tutorial at ISMIR in Kobe on the 26th.

The Velvet Underground Evolutionary Tree

As part of our tutorial on music visualizations at ISMIR at the end of the month we’ll be surveying the wide range of personal, human-rendered visualizations of the music space.  There’s a wide variety of such visualizations – but one of my favorites,  is the Velvet Underground Evolutionary Tree

put together by the author of the Kenosha Kid’s blog.  It’s a phylogenetic tree with the Velvet Underground as the common ancestor – it has bands as the branches, and music genres as the leaves (along with a stray calamari), and a dig at the ‘barnacle’ power pop critic Steve Simels.    This visualization has it all!