Tristan F's Musical taste
Tristan F from the BBC posted this hand drawing of his musical taste to Flickr. As he says in the photo comments: I had to stop at some point so it’s not comprehensive. But it’s all about connections.
I find these types of drawings to yield really interesting insights into the listener and to music in general. For instance Tristan has a line connecting Sufjan Stevens to Bill Frisell. I’m still pondering that connection. As I prepare for my upcoming ISMIR tutorial on Using Visualizations for Discovering Music, I’d like to collect a few more personal visualizations of music taste. If you feel so inclined , draw a picture that represents your music taste, post it to Flickr and tag it with ‘MyMusicTaste’. I’ll post a follow up … and particularly interesting ones will appear in the tutorial.
Music Machinery 
#1 by Tristan on September 28, 2009 - 4:41 am
I think that connection is from my UK perspective of American folk-influenced music. But like I said, there are a lot of artists and connections missing. And I might be wrong.
#2 by brian on September 30, 2009 - 6:30 pm
a funny thing w/ the sufjan->frisell link is that it only lasted for a couple albums of both of their careers, and did not overlap. pre-“Nashville” frisell would be pretty much opposite any MDS you can muster against sufjan. And sufjan had that electronic phase early on. This is yet another strong set of evidence for representing artists as paths in time rather than single nodes in a graph….
#3 by Tristan on October 2, 2009 - 9:01 am
Good point about the changing sounds of artists. I’ve put up some more representations on Radio Labs blog.