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About Hyphae
Hyphae is a free, living map of music: the genres we can source, where they came from, how they connect, and what they sound like. Made by Colin Robinson, in homage to Every Noise at Once by Glenn McDonald.
Hyphae are the threads a fungus grows through. This is the web genres grow through.
Say it HY-fee, like hyphy, the Bay Area movement. The double meaning is on purpose.
Why an homage
For ten years Glenn McDonald's Every Noise at Once mapped music the way people actually listen to it, ending at 6,291 genres. When Spotify laid him off in December 2023, the map lost its data and stopped growing. It is still online at everynoise.com and you can still explore it, but it is no longer updated. Hyphae is not a copy: none of its genre names, positions or data are used here. It tries to keep its spirit going, on open data anyone can check.
Explore, don't rule. The map is an invitation to wander, not a verdict on what a genre is. Genres overlap and argue, and that is fine.
A genre is its people. Every genre here is tied to the artists who make it, and a sound can belong to more than one family.
Every scene gets a fair shot. Edges drops you on a small, little-visited genre, and small genres get their names on the map as you come close.
Hear it, don't just read about it. Tap anything to hear it. Previews always come from the exact artist named.
Simple rules you can check. No black box: every fact links to where it came from, and anything the sources don't say is left blank.
Listening belongs to listeners. Hyphae runs on records people made and gave away: Wikidata, MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz.
Alive, not finished. The map is regrown from open data every month, so genres can arrive and fade.
How a genre gets on the map
It has its own entry on Wikidata, with at least one artist linked to it.
Its year and place come only from Wikidata. If Wikidata doesn't say, the card says so.
Every thread between genres names its source: Wikidata, MusicBrainz or the first hand-made map.
Names in other languages are used only where that language already has one. Artist names are never translated.
A genre whose only source is Spotify or Every Noise is left out, so nothing of Glenn's is copied by accident.
Artist cards
Albums, labels, links and photos are looked up live from MusicBrainz and Wikidata each time you open a card, and nothing is stored.
A streaming or social link is exact only when those records name the page. Otherwise it is marked as a search.
Photos come from Wikimedia Commons, credited to their author with their licence. Album covers come from the Cover Art Archive.
Labels come from Wikidata. A label is shown when Wikidata names one of the map's genres as its genre, or when at least three of its acts are filed under one. Each thread says which.
Where AI fits
No AI chooses the music, writes the facts or makes any sound here. Every genre, link and date comes from people's open records and links back to them.
One person conceived Hyphae and set its rules: open sources, every fact cited, previews only from the exact artist, and credit to Glenn. The same person designed its views, look and layout, decided what belongs on the map, tested it on desktop and phone, directed the fixes, and approves everything that ships. AI tools, under that direction, wrote most of the code and the data pipeline and drafted the translations.
Others we learn from
MusicBrainzstarted by Robert Kaye after a free CD database was taken private. Its lesson: open data is worth only as much as the people who keep it.