Continuing today’s mini-trend of visualizing data, I had to also post about JKlabs’ shockingly comphrensive History of Sampling chart. Pretty wild from any number of angles. Even just as a superficial depiction of two bell curves that emphasize the source/evolution relationship between 70’s-80’s music and 90’s-00’s sounds, it’s interesting. As these kooky bloggers point out, one heck of a lot of work must have gone into this thing.

Some of the functionality of the interface is a little kludgy - it takes a minute to understand, for instance, that if you type letters on the keyboard, an invisible (at least in Firefox) entry box in the middle of the screen will start displaying letters and matching your typing with names of bands in the data base. And to grasp that once you select a band, the interface not only links a specific (arbitrary) album to its sample sources, but also highlights other albums by that band, which you can also click on to get the same connection. And to guess that by clicking on a blank space, you reset the chart.

There also appear to be some strange gaps in the data - I can’t believe, for instance, that no one ever sampled the Jackson 5. Also (although maybe it isn’t a sample) I’m surprised that Nirvana’s use of the riff from Boston’s “More than a Feeling” for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” isn’t in there (and neither the Cobain band nor Boston are in there at all). But to some extent, given that this was apparently a labor of love rather than a commercial project, it’s hard to quibble with it. Too much.

JF

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Usability, Finds.