Jun 28, 2012 - 2 Comments - BCN and around, Interactive systems, Music, Web -

TuneMap (Alpha)

TuneMap is a tool for music browsing based on geolocation. It was developed by Guillermo Malón, Alberto González and me during the 2012 Barcelona Music Hack Day. It uses The Echo Nest’s and Deezer’s APIs for obtaining artists’ information and music previews. Maps were taken from Open Street Maps, styled by Stamen and and information overlay was provided by Leaflet.

TuneMap’s basic working principle is simple. Let’s suppose you are curious about how bands from some place (ie. a city) in the world sound like. So you can use the menus to select a country and then a city in that country. You will obtain a list of artists/bands from that city. Then you can browse those artists’ discography and listen to previews of their songs. If you have a Deezer account and you are currently logged, you can listen to the whole songs.

TuneMap navigation

TuneMap is not completed yet, and we consider it to be in Alpha stage. The map is not navegable and there are a number of bugs. Also not all the features we have in mind are implemented yet. However, we and other people think it is promising: it won Deezer’s price during the Music Hack day, and it was mentioned on the The Echo Nest’s blog.

We will continue improving it, so if you would like to keep in touch, please follow TuneMap on Twitter!

2 Responses to TuneMap (Alpha)

  1. Ina

    Sounds good.
    Did you make any ad-hoc discoveries/observations about bands, sounds, music and their geographical location?

    29 Jun 2012 - Reply
    • JP

      Hello!
      Well, I must say that so far we’ve been so busy developing the tool that we have not had enough time to play with it! But that’s the idea, eventually.
      One of the sources of inspiration for TuneMap was a world map of metal bands per capita, posted in reddit by user depo_, and quoted on the Atlantic Wire. For me it suggests that we can learn a few things about music and people by visualizing (and listening to) information in this way. We also think that it is a fun way to discover music!

      We are planning to implement more features in TuneMap that may help finding similar interesting patterns.

      Keep in touch and thanks for reading!

      29 Jun 2012 -

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