“An incredibly simple, deep way to explore all of music,” say map creators The Echo Nest.
After a shot of antiviral pop? How about grave wave? Trace the bloodline of hundreds of music genres with this impressive sound-based map by those bods at The Echo Nest.
The Sound of Everything is a sprawling, sonic family tree that lets you click on 1,387 genres to hear what they sound like immediately, bringing up a canon of that genre’s music when you click on the arrow.
You can also search for artists to find out where they fall on the scatter-plotted map, so you’ll never be left scratching your head for a description again.
“This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1,387 genres by The Echo Nest,” says the Spotify-owned music data platform.
“The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.”
Wave goodbye to your Thursday afternoon.
Read next: Discover the sounds of the world with Spotify’s interactive musical map
