Ultimate Breaks & Beats Explorer is an interactive audio experience that allows the user to trace the sonic influence of breakbeats included on this gray market compilation series through the history of hip-hop, electronic, and pop music from the 80’s and 90’s to today.
Ultimate Breaks & Beats was a series of compilation records curated by producer, DJ and dancer Breakbeat Lou from 1986 to 1991. The 25 volumes of Ultimate Breaks & Beats canonized a collection of songs — and the percussive breakbeats they contained — to form the musical lexicon of classic hip-hop. Breakbeat Lou compiled these volumes with songs familiar from the breakdance scene of the 1970's, drawing from disco, funk, rock, Latin, and pop music. His idiosyncratic selections ran the gamut from hit records to obscure gems, and as the technique of digital sampling was just beginning, Ultimate Breaks & Beats became a sacred text for producers. What began as a series of records for DJs to use at parties became the foundation of a new musical language, as groundbreaking producers like Marley Marl and others drew heavily from these compilations when creating the sound of hip-hop.Songs like Impeach the President (by little-known funk band The Honey Drippers) and Amen, Brother (by The Winstons, the backing group for soul singer Curtis Mayfield) featured infectious drum breaks that collectively have been sampled thousands of times, begetting generations of music from hip-hop to jungle, drum'n'bass, and beyond.
This project evolved out of a more general-purpose project called Sample Graph Explorer that I built for a class at NYU’s Iteractive Media Arts program. In building on the earlier Sample Graph Explorer, which was meant to integrate data from public APIs including Discogs and MusicBrainz, I realized that I wanted to create something to tell a more specific story instead of just being an open-ended tool. I settled on the Ultimate Breaks & Beats story because I found it fascinating that a single curator’s somewhat idiosyncratic taste has influenced generations of music; and while many people know about some of the most iconic samples, they may not know the story of how those samples became iconic to begin with. Some of the questions that I sought to answer included how to visualize geography and audio culture, and how to balance narrative structure against interaction and exploration.
The UBB Explorer was created using React, Typescript, Next, Framer Motion, Howler.js, and Web Audio. It integrates public data from the MusicBrainz API as well as Open Graph data from Spotify.