7mesh.com

If you’re like me and like music there’s an excellent Adobe Flash-based music visualization discovery tool called TuneGlue, that unfortunately looks like it’s about to die because the website at audiomap.tuneglue.net is down. The good news is there’s a version still up on the original developer’s website and it works fantastic.

The algorithm uses tags from last.fm and Amazon.com to correlate the relationships. What you do is select a band to create a genre-based visual relationship map, or what TuneGlue calls a relationship explorer. Just type in a band’s name in the search window at top right. An atom is created in the center of the screen. In that corner you can also set your preferences, e.g. the elasticity & friction of atoms (don’t ask, just fool with them). You can select the number of atoms that surround the center atom and then select new atoms to search on by right clicking the center of them and expanding their relationships. Relationships are created automatically by tuneglue’s advanced algorithm, making what eventually looks like complex chemical compounds. They begin to have kind of a artistic beauty all their own.

Here is an example search I used to write this article and a very high resolution PNG file (298kb) for a closer look. The center search was Thievery Corporation, and to keep the example small, I expanded only a few bands I’m familiar with in the genre:

Here’s a zoom-in of the left side of the molecule:

Clicking on an atom gives you some options to lock position, delete the atom, expand relationships, and get more information on album releases as a pop-up window:

As with most Flash-based apps, the busier the application (or the more it has to think), the slower the response time. So creating very large relationship maps of genres of music is a little unwieldy, even on a high-end workstation. Still, it’s difficult to not be tempted to make gigantic maps of whole genres of music and make them into works of art.

Alas it is not a new tool. But it is a fun tool nonetheless and extremely useful. So sorry to see it go.