Didn't expect to see something I made on HN while my wife is trying to find something to watch on TV.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.
Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers
I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can
Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.
Historical comment only. I first listened to this music in the late 1970s. One big change in the story, over time, is how few people trace the sound to Hendrix now. (Not this map in particular. Metal fans I know would agree with the map.) I think (?) a common current viewpoint is that Led Zep [!?] was foundational but the genre really started with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Which, definitions change. But in 1977 I listened to Purple Haze and, sure, it was "Psychedelic Rock" as indicated on the map. 100%! But it was also almost definitionally metal. Forty-nine years ago, I mean, not today.
[!?] I love Zeppelin. But I would have been laughed out of high school if I'd compared them to metal, or claimed they were even hard rock.
That’s interesting. Somehow my brain never really put that together. He was obviously ripping heavy blues and innovated more than anyone before and arguably since. Thanks for adding him into my mental Metal flow chart.
For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.
I started learning guitar in 2006 and my guitar teacher pointed out how metal originated from Hendrix's sound. I always thought that was common knowledge
I'd love of this showed me the spiritual successors of a band / sub-genre even if they're not mainstream or well known. For example, I really love Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and a number of other "classic" Heavy Metal bands with a slow, hard but not sludgy brooding sound and amazing vocals. But it's hard finding modern acts with a similar sound. What tends to happen when I search for modern metal is I end up finding stuff that is more a descendant of speed metal, or thrash, or black metal... and none of that really strikes the right chord for me.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
FWIW, There's a lot of new bands sounding like the old classic Metal bands, they are `tagged` as NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal), such as:
Absolutely love Lucifer and Tailgunner. Wouldn’t put them in the same category, but highly recommended for fans of Iron Maiden or anyone who listened to Deep Purple growing up.
You ever heard of Every Noise at Once? You can search for an artist, see the genres they belong to, and then look for artists nearby in 2D musical space (oversimplified a bit to be fair) within that genre. I've found it's generally pretty accurate, and I've found plenty of new artists this way.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
I've got a particular itch that's difficult to scratch, and I'm not seeing anything on this site that reflects the genre.
I've heard it as 'metalstep' but I'm sure there are other names for it. Very aggressive cross between metal and EDM. More of a metal sensibility than hardcore EDM; more of an EDM / trance sensibility than, say, Fear Factory. The drum tracks have more of a death metal vibe to them. It's probably easy to blend into other genres.
I'm thinking stuff like Invocation Array, Rave The Requivm, Follow the Cipher, even stuff like The Algorithm and Neurotech. I suppose Fear Factory would count here as well.
Great map. There might be some categories missing, couldn't find any Katatonia, Agalloch, Alcest nor Tiamat. Alcest and some Deftones are considered blackgaze and Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room fall more into grey metal.
It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution..
what a shame. I didn't realize the author worked for Spotify. Guess it makes sense. Spotify should've acquired it from the author or made a deal with him to keep it live since all the links lead to Spotify anyway.
I was enjoying this until I started reading the descriptions of the genres. The person that made this is very opinionated and not afraid to say what they think about certain genres they do not like!
i also made something like this. it cover 17M entities across tracks albums artists and labels. posted on show hn a few times but it went unnoticed (hate u (joking))
Given this is Hacker News, this easily could have been some re-vamped "table" of metal elements or what the linked site ultimately is ... LOL. Personally, I am more happy with the actual site than metallurgy.
Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change
Swedish death is a specific sound like Entombed, which is fairly different than melo-death bands like In Flames.
I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.
Holy crap, someone recognizes Neue Deutsch Härte as the legit metal genre it is! And the playlist includes 5 März by the Alexx-era Megaherz! Excellent work!!!
Mastodon isn't sludge in any way, mate... sludge is hardcore punk + (proto) doom metal. It's what the Melvins, the B-side of Black Flags's My War and early Flippers spawned, so mostly the NOLA scene (Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Acid Bath, Buzzoven, etc...) and "others" (Grief, Floor, 16).
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
m̈ëẗäl̈ üm̈l̈äüẗs̈ (awww, you can't put an umlaut on a space) (oh wow the HM font does not like what I just did. It looks fine in the monospace font)
I liked the anti-establishment, Anarchist/socialist vibes of the Hardcore punk rock island. Don't like all of the macho posing and shrieking (neither in punk and especially not in the more "black" part); and double dislike the crass commercialization of so much of it.
why when i click the different links does new music representing that period not play? I expected to hear 1960's progenitors to metal when I clicked that section
Didn't expect to see something I made on HN while my wife is trying to find something to watch on TV.
So about the site in case anyone is interested. I made it with a friend who was studying multimedia. He helped with the data and I did the coding. Took about a week or two.
The site was originally Flash (remember that). But I ported it to HTML5 a few years ago. It still has those Flash vibes I think. Posted the code to GitHub when I ported it. I did this mostly to keep it alive for old times sake.
So about the mobile support. I planned to do it but got sidetracked building a custom WebGL map renderer because phone performance was poor. However I never finished, life finds a way to get in the way and all that... I have some mobile designs lying around.
The other issue was when I first built the site YouTube didn't really play ads much at all, just those little text ads, and you could embed the player really tiny. So it worked better. In the original flash version I actually hid the video player. But that got the site blacklisted from YouTube, I asked a Google engineer on a dev forum to put a word in and they removed the block, very different times, this was back when Google was a different beast, and you could chat to real people online and the dev communities were much smaller.
I have a illustration of a much bigger map in my sketchbook. It has a lot more subgenres and interconnected things like historical events and so on. But it's huge unfolded, like 2x1.5m or something ridiculous.
I miss those days when the web was full of weird and experimental stuff. I grew up with Newgrounds and Geocities, I'm sure it's all still out there buried under a giant pile of SEO optimised refuse.
Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.
HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.
Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.
Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!
Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.
> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.
I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?
You can sort of get that old-internet vibe today from the I2P network.
This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.
Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.
This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.
Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers
I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can
Very awesome. Thanks for sharing and for making this. Reminds me of the Metal Evolution documentary by BangerTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmiqVYZHTIQ&list=PLgzW3ulw6T...
Source code repository: https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal.
> It still has those Flash vibes I think.
I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.
Any chance to get a high resolution photo of the sketchbook version? Would love to also have a look at that :)
Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.
Maps, a great way to present music. Congrats for the work, brought back fond memories.
Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.
If you switch to the desktop version in the menu it works fine
Sorry about that. Its definitely a desktop kinda experience anyway.
I see you chose the superior version of 43% Burnt by Dillinger. It blows my mind that he never became the new vocalist.
So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!
i haven't seen this since the flash days. so cool. glad you ported it so it's still accessible!
One of the "I'm trying to find it" ... Fantasy metal. I was wondering where I'd find Blind Guardian ( https://youtu.be/n63UbX5kzAc https://youtu.be/uOMfsywQgY0?si=7N9hcXJcqbZtJ1jC&t=953 ) or the newly emerging dwarfish metal genre with Windrose (best known for their rendition of Diggy Diggy Hole https://youtu.be/34CZjsEI1yU but they've got other music that celebrates fantasy dwarf culture - https://lnk.to/WindRose-Trollslayer )
Very nice map.
Historical comment only. I first listened to this music in the late 1970s. One big change in the story, over time, is how few people trace the sound to Hendrix now. (Not this map in particular. Metal fans I know would agree with the map.) I think (?) a common current viewpoint is that Led Zep [!?] was foundational but the genre really started with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Which, definitions change. But in 1977 I listened to Purple Haze and, sure, it was "Psychedelic Rock" as indicated on the map. 100%! But it was also almost definitionally metal. Forty-nine years ago, I mean, not today.
[!?] I love Zeppelin. But I would have been laughed out of high school if I'd compared them to metal, or claimed they were even hard rock.
That’s interesting. Somehow my brain never really put that together. He was obviously ripping heavy blues and innovated more than anyone before and arguably since. Thanks for adding him into my mental Metal flow chart.
For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.
I started learning guitar in 2006 and my guitar teacher pointed out how metal originated from Hendrix's sound. I always thought that was common knowledge
Reminds me very much of https://music.ishkur.com/ which is the same kind of thing but for electronic music.
The original Ishkur's Guide is even more similar, here's a modern recreation of it: https://igorbrigadir.github.io/ishkurs-guide-dataset/
Wow thanks for sharing, went straight to Eurotrash and it didn't dissapoint
The descriptions are a bit more tongue-in-cheek, though. I love it.
I'd love of this showed me the spiritual successors of a band / sub-genre even if they're not mainstream or well known. For example, I really love Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and a number of other "classic" Heavy Metal bands with a slow, hard but not sludgy brooding sound and amazing vocals. But it's hard finding modern acts with a similar sound. What tends to happen when I search for modern metal is I end up finding stuff that is more a descendant of speed metal, or thrash, or black metal... and none of that really strikes the right chord for me.
There used to be a thing like 20-ish years ago called Musicovery that could sort of do this if you clicked around.
Doom, stoner doom, stoner sludge.
Bands like Sleep, OM, Electric Wizard, Weedeater, Dopesmoker, Satans Satyrs, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Salems Pot, Acid Witch… there’s so so many.
Also heavier bands that are more stoner/psych than metal like All Them Witches, Mars Red Sky, Dead Meadow, Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin, all rip too.
The Sword might be what you're looking for - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL7ndxWgW5A
FWIW, There's a lot of new bands sounding like the old classic Metal bands, they are `tagged` as NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal), such as:
- White Wizzard
- Tailgunner
- Skull Fist
- Wolf
- Enforcer
- 3 Inches of Blood
- Lucifer
- and many others
Witchcraft (especially their earlier albums) really scratches this itch for me
Absolutely love Lucifer and Tailgunner. Wouldn’t put them in the same category, but highly recommended for fans of Iron Maiden or anyone who listened to Deep Purple growing up.
You ever heard of Every Noise at Once? You can search for an artist, see the genres they belong to, and then look for artists nearby in 2D musical space (oversimplified a bit to be fair) within that genre. I've found it's generally pretty accurate, and I've found plenty of new artists this way.
Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.
I've got a particular itch that's difficult to scratch, and I'm not seeing anything on this site that reflects the genre.
I've heard it as 'metalstep' but I'm sure there are other names for it. Very aggressive cross between metal and EDM. More of a metal sensibility than hardcore EDM; more of an EDM / trance sensibility than, say, Fear Factory. The drum tracks have more of a death metal vibe to them. It's probably easy to blend into other genres.
I'm thinking stuff like Invocation Array, Rave The Requivm, Follow the Cipher, even stuff like The Algorithm and Neurotech. I suppose Fear Factory would count here as well.
Check out the band smash stereo, and check out the doom (2016) and doom the dark ages sound tracks.
electro-industrial?
Great map. There might be some categories missing, couldn't find any Katatonia, Agalloch, Alcest nor Tiamat. Alcest and some Deftones are considered blackgaze and Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room fall more into grey metal.
It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.
Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.
Black Sabbath, the consensus originators of metal as a whole, weren’t considered metal until albums inspired by their sound became popular, either.
They (Black Sabbath) were booked as a blues band by Jazz Bilzen in 1970. People just didn't know where to bucket sort them at the time.
I see Tiamat at Goth Metal.
Ya'll should checkout https://everynoise.com/. Similar in spirit.
Just read the update:
> 2024-01-05 status update: With my 2023-12-04 layoff from Spotify I lost the internal data-access required for ongoing updates to many parts of this site. Most of this, as a result, is now a static snapshot of what, for now, will be the final state from the site's 10-year history and evolution..
what a shame. I didn't realize the author worked for Spotify. Guess it makes sense. Spotify should've acquired it from the author or made a deal with him to keep it live since all the links lead to Spotify anyway.
There's a really great map of electronic music here that I've always loved
https://music.ishkur.com/
I was enjoying this until I started reading the descriptions of the genres. The person that made this is very opinionated and not afraid to say what they think about certain genres they do not like!
Where is the "Purchase Print" button so I can tack this poster to my wall?
i also made something like this. it cover 17M entities across tracks albums artists and labels. posted on show hn a few times but it went unnoticed (hate u (joking))
https://toposonico.com/#lon=14.4313&lat=-1.0200&z=9.10&entit...
that's pretty cool, thanks!
thank you! :)
Metal music. Not chemical elements. Not Apple’s graphics API.
Given this is Hacker News, this easily could have been some re-vamped "table" of metal elements or what the linked site ultimately is ... LOL. Personally, I am more happy with the actual site than metallurgy.
I was hoping it was a metallurgical table myself but was pleasantly surprised with a map of my favorite music genre. Win either way.
Love it, though it looks like the website got the HN hug of death.
One of my favorite documentaries to learn the history of metal is "metal: a headbanger's journey" (available on YouTube).
Ahh yes, the origin of this classic clip!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkl4Yeh-BTo
Took awhile to figure out clicking the skull is the interactive element, I kept clicking the text label and nothing was happening
This website has instantly more relevance than 50% of the online news outlets out there.
The song "Ten Ton Hammer" from Machine Head is not right: it's showing another song. Besides that, fun experience!
Reminds me of the works of Ward Shelley. Especially his History of Science Fiction.
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ward-shelley-history-of-scienc...
Where can I find a full resolution version of that image?
Nevermind, I found this thing called Google that found it for me <g>
https://websites.umich.edu/~esrabkin/sf/HistoryOfSFVisualize...
really nice! For the inclined, there's also
https://www.metal-archives.com/
And here I was thinking it would be a materials science map
Me too. Maybe someone can find a data source and vibe up a mapofmetals.com in the same style.
Reminded me a bit on the design space of Metal logos: https://renecutura.eu/metalvis/
Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change
Not sure why there is Swedish death metal when Melodic Death exists.
Swedish death is a specific sound like Entombed, which is fairly different than melo-death bands like In Flames.
I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.
I see Judas Priest, I upvote.
I see Yngwie, I also upvote.
I see Mercyful Fate or King Diamond and I also upvote!
Very cool visual representation of metal history. I'm working on something similar for basketball history.
Very nice work of art. (I don't really like the bullets though, they don't seem very metal-y to me. Scythes maybe, or flensing knives.)
It might be fun to have a sort of gazetteer for the map so we can find bands.
It's common enough that they are sold as an accessory. Search for "metal bullet belt".
Holy crap, someone recognizes Neue Deutsch Härte as the legit metal genre it is! And the playlist includes 5 März by the Alexx-era Megaherz! Excellent work!!!
That live version of War Pigs is INSANE
Seeing as this is HN, I was expecting something on chemical properties of iron etc, but was pleasantly surprised
Grateful it's not an agentic start-up.
Love it. gonna be listening yardbirds all day today. The map also feels like a jeans.
Where would Mastodon be on this?
Sludge metal, where else...
Mastodon isn't sludge in any way, mate... sludge is hardcore punk + (proto) doom metal. It's what the Melvins, the B-side of Black Flags's My War and early Flippers spawned, so mostly the NOLA scene (Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Acid Bath, Buzzoven, etc...) and "others" (Grief, Floor, 16).
Perhaps we need a word to disambiguate "atmosludge" from actual sludge, for the same reason "skramz" was invented.
If there’s no bug infested dreadlocks then it ain’t sludge!
Except Dixie Dave. Eyes crossed from Jim beam and cough syrup works too.
This is amazing! But I need SEARCH feature :)
Btw, the map interface is very well implemented, what is it based on?
Looking at the source, it seems to be using OpenSeadragon[0].
[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/
To be excapt: This is a Mäp of Metäl, no hair was cut in making the map.
As a German, metal umlauts look so confusing
m̈ëẗäl̈ üm̈l̈äüẗs̈ (awww, you can't put an umlaut on a space) (oh wow the HM font does not like what I just did. It looks fine in the monospace font)
Isn't the ¨ (U+00A8) character equivalent to an umlaut on a space?
I suppose you used ◌̈ (U+0308).
There is no need for anything else, on the Internet.
\m/
Most awesome site ever created.
Nu Metal not having any Linkin Park songs is a crime.
Mike Shinoda is fine with not being classified as Nu Metal https://blabbermouth.net/news/linkin-parks-mike-shinoda-says...
beautifully done!
I liked the anti-establishment, Anarchist/socialist vibes of the Hardcore punk rock island. Don't like all of the macho posing and shrieking (neither in punk and especially not in the more "black" part); and double dislike the crass commercialization of so much of it.
Punk is for politics and Metal is for Partying.
Yeah very good song choices there.
why when i click the different links does new music representing that period not play? I expected to hear 1960's progenitors to metal when I clicked that section
Now that is a great map!