The History of Rock

Rock ’n’ roll is one of the most popular music genres today, but that wasn’t always the case. When did it begin? In 2011, the Guardian published a list of one hundred songs that represent milestones along the history of rock music. This was the seed that sprouted into our investigation.

We enriched the original data with information about the bands from Last.fm, scores of song characteristics from Echo Nest, and band-to-band influences from Music Bloodline. Abstractly we were exploring a network of collaborative product development over time, analogous to other multi-dimensional datasets of relationships. The final visualization presented here unites a network graph and a timeline into a cohesive view of influences on the one hand, and an understanding of time series on the other.