“If you’d like to discovery some new music and do it in a visually appealing way, TuneGlue let’s [sic] you explore the relationship between artists and bands in a connection-based web… We went from Iggy Pop through Patti Smith -> PJ Harvey -> Tori Amos -> Alanis Morissette -> The Craberries -> Garbage.”

This looks like 1) a really fun way to kill time and discover new music and 2) a potentially-useful educational tool. This could be used to plan historical, genre-related, or other types of sequences for lesson plans. It could even displayed on a SmartBoard or projector as an in-class activity. I’m excited to play around with this and see what it can do.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that though the Lifehacker review only mentions pop music examples, I tried out a few art music composers and it worked well! Jazz too. It seems Western-centric, though, which is one disadvantage.

This is really interesting and brings up a few questions for music education: how do we (and can we even try to?) go about teaching this? There’s the straightforward, mostly academic “instruments, important figures, significant songs and albums, swing feel, groove, blues scales, syncopation, etc. etc.” kind of approach that I’ve experienced in my own education, but is that all that it really takes to get your brain to start working in this way? For the sake of facilitating education I think it’s probably important to try and focus on this, see if the study and its results can be replicated consistently in order to see if a teaching method can be derived that can best scaffold the student towards this kind of behavior, but at the same time I feel like that’d take away a lot of the fun of playing jazz. Wouldn’t it be more serendipitous if we just arrived there accidentally-on-purpose?