About the atlas

Open Music Atlas is a musical atlas in which places themselves are the subject of original music.

Most music maps show where an artist, a genre or a recording comes from. This one is different: each song is about the place it belongs to — its landscape, its history, its peoples, languages and culture — and is written in a musical style drawn from that place's own traditions. Explore it on the map, search it, or simply listen to it, a continent at a time.

The World Music Atlas

The World Music Atlas is the atlas's flagship collection. Its first edition, the 2026 Founding Edition, gives a song to 203 places: every member and observer state of the United Nations, and eight territories and other places. It is frozen, so it stays a faithful record of that first collection. Future editions are planned as new interpretations alongside it, never replacements.

How the songs were made

Every song began with what the place should teach: where it is, its capital, key moments in its history, its peoples, languages and culture. Lyrics were drafted with AI writing assistance, guided by that brief, and where a place needed particular care they were written and revised individually. The music was composed with Suno, an AI music system, in a style chosen for each place. Every song was then reviewed, and in some cases rewritten or regenerated, before it was published.

That makes the atlas a record of a particular moment: an early meeting of generative music, geographic information and human curation. The curation — what belongs, how each place is represented, what makes up an edition, and what is preserved — is the human work at its centre.

Curation

Roman Hancel — Curator of the World Music Atlas.

How places are chosen, named and represented is set out in the curatorial policy.

Topics Archive

The atlas grew out of the Topics Archive, a wider archive of music about real life — biographies, history, the Bible and more — where these songs were first made. Each place page links to the people of that place who have their own songs there.

Listening and the music

The songs are streamed through their provider's player. Open Music Atlas does not offer audio downloads or downloadable audio links. For builders, the developer pages describe the open data and the embeddable player.