NMC Recordings Record Label Music Map
NMC Recordings is a UK record label promoting new music from the UK. The Music Map was first developed in 2010 by AVCO.
In 2016 NMC asked us to update the original Adobe Flash version so that it would work with modern compliant web technologies.
The Music Map is an innovative visual web app which allows users to explore the NMC composers using the relationships ‘who composer studied with’ and ‘similar composers’. The experience is both a sonic and visual journey through the catalogue via the relationships between the label's composers.
Creating a. meaningful journey between the composers required editorial decisions and data input with respect to what type of relationships would be of interest and how to categorise the artists by both music style and historical category.
Suggested historical categories are represented with orbiting discs around the focused composer. For each composer there are one minute audio samples so the user has both a visual and sonic experience when navigating between the composers. There is a dynamic search facility to quickly locate your starting composer.
The Music Map is pulling data from the same Drupal database as the NMC Website using the Drupal JSON:API. You could describe the Music Map as a headless Drupal Web Application.
Converting from Flash to HTML5/Javascript required the use of a graphics library to draw to the HTML5 Canvas Element. We evaluated several frameworks, including P5.js, and found that Paper.js offered the best performance for our requirements.
