Visualizing Music

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!