Dr. Ivan's Blog Medicine Art and Design Programming Music




About

This is a fun little program which uses data from Wikipedia to create a map of music genres. Genres are interconnected according to their stylistic origins: For example, progressive metal has its origins in progressive rock, which in turn is influenced by hard rock; hard rock has its roots in rock and roll which is stylistically preceded by blues and so on. Based on this, a map can be compiled showing interrelations of all genres Wikipedia lists - which is precisely what this little C++ program does.

Please note though that the data is gathered automatically. Therefore correctness of the results depends entirely on the information provided by Wikipedia.



The Map

Screenshot of a sample music genre map:



Download the PDF-version of the newest map from here.
This version was created from a total of 863 Wikipedia pages resulting in 2257 connections.




Downloads

Current version: 0.0.5


Linux (source): mgm-v.0.0.5.tar.gz
Compiled Map (PDF): mgm-2009.10.18.pdf





Version History

  • v.0.0.5 - changed html parsing according to new Wikipedia output format; simplified the parsing process; dealloc memory properly
  • v.0.0.4 - also reading sub-genres / fusion genres now
  • v.0.0.3 - first working version - only origins are read; tidy removed
  • v.0.0.2 - drop manual html reading, use instead 'tidy' to convert to xml and read that with libxml2 parser
  • v.0.0.1 - first crude proof-of-concept




Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me.