About the Mix

I've been on many road trips. Driving across the country visiting national parks. Most of the time I or one of my travel partners makes a playlist of music to listen to. Back in the day we didn't have podcasts, only mixtapes, A.M. radio, and Art Bell. Music was the default choice.

Driving across the cities and states often times a song would come on that referenced some place near by. When not driving there's not much to think about, and my mind started to wander to the questions: who has been to the most places?, or which song visits the most places?, or I wonder how many people have been to this city?. Well after many years of this sitting in the back of my mind, I decided to start to document it and build it.

A.I.?

Computers and AI agents run everything in this day and age, might as well have them run this too. Right?

Well, kinda. The first 600 or so songs I input by hand. I read the lyrics, researched the songs and artists. I made a running list of songs that mentioned someplace while I was listening to things. As you can guess, this was time consuming. I made great uses of the lyrics on Genius. With some help from chatGPT, and the 9gb Kaggle dataset, I was able to up my game.

This wasn't as easy as it sounds though, and all of the pitfalls of AI came to light. It's very good at identifying places, or words that look like places. It's not great at the context of the place within the song, the obvious examples being Paris, France vs. Paris Texas, but also Springfield - which one, there's 23 cities with that name across 3 countries.

I still need to manually review things, and spot check random artists. My scripts aren't perfect (and the AI generated ones are less so), there are for sure incorrect album ⇒ song mappings, but it's the data that's important.

About Me

Being a webdevloper, I felt the best way to visualize this was to build a website. Building visualizations in my professional career gave me ideas for unique and ace examples to explore this data.

Having a full time job and a family of course means that I don't have unlimted time to build and expand this project for all the features and visuals I want, but that's the beauty of the web - I can iterate as I have time, I can take feedback and add new views.

Contact

If you have something you want to suggest, or something that's broken, or just want to say, this is so ace, hit me up - dj@mixtape.rocks. Yes, that email works.