What started as an experiment in combining geography and AI-assisted music production became a born-digital musical atlas covering 203 places around the world.
🌍 Explore the project: https://openmusicatlas.org
The Idea
I’ve always been interested in the intersection of geography, technology, and how people understand the world.
As a geospatial developer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how geographic information can be represented, organized, and explored.
Maps are one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding our planet.
But what happens when we introduce music into that experience?
What would it look like to build a musical atlas where someone could select a country and listen to a musical interpretation inspired by that place?
That question eventually led me to build the World Music Atlas.
The project combines geography, AI-assisted music production, digital archives, and web development into an interactive experience.
The initial collection now represents 203 places around the world.
From an Educational Music Archive to a Global Atlas
Before building the World Music Atlas, I had been developing another project called Topics Archive.
Topics Archive explores how AI-assisted music can be used to organize and communicate knowledge.
The platform includes musical collections exploring subjects such as:
- Historical biographies
- Biblical narratives
- Geography and world cultures
- Inventions and scientific developments
- FIFA World Cup history
The underlying idea is that music can become another interface for learning.
Instead of treating songs exclusively as entertainment, we can also organize them into educational and thematic archives.
The World Music Atlas emerged from that broader experiment.
I wanted to take one of those collections and build a dedicated geographic experience around it.
Not simply a playlist of countries.
An actual musical atlas.
The 2026 Founding Edition
The first major milestone was establishing a collection representing the world.
The resulting 2026 Founding Edition includes 203 places, covering 195 countries and eight additional territories.
Each location has an associated musical work inspired by that place.
The atlas provides a geographic interface for discovering these works and exploring the collection.
The experience connects three elements:
Place → Music → Discovery
A user can begin with a geographic location, discover its associated musical work, and explore additional places through the atlas.
The objective is not to claim that an AI-generated song represents the definitive musical identity of a country.
Instead, the collection offers creative musical interpretations inspired by geography, culture, history, and place.
This distinction is important.
AI-assisted musical interpretation should not be confused with authentic documentation of a community’s traditional music.
The World Music Atlas is a curated digital creation, not an ethnomusicological authority.
Building the Atlas as a Software Platform
One of my goals was to make the project more than a collection of songs.
I wanted to establish a foundation that could support future editions, geographic expansion, and developer integrations.
The website is built using Next.js and deployed through Vercel.
The musical collection originated within Topics Archive, with the atlas accessing its underlying data through a read-only database connection.
This allowed me to establish a dedicated geographic experience without unnecessarily duplicating the existing archive.
The platform includes several important components.
Geographic Exploration
The /explore experience provides an entry point into the collection.
Users can discover musical works through geographic locations rather than relying exclusively on conventional music discovery methods such as artist names, albums, or genres.
This introduces another way of thinking about music interfaces.
A location can become the primary discovery mechanism.
Place Pages
Individual place pages provide dedicated destinations for the musical works associated with particular geographic locations.
For example, the atlas includes locations such as Jamaica, Haiti, France, Japan, Brazil, and Bangladesh.
These pages establish a foundation for future geographic and cultural context.
Curatorial Policy
The project also includes a curatorial policy.
When building an AI-assisted cultural collection, it is important to distinguish creative interpretation from documented cultural representation.
The atlas is intended to support curiosity and discovery while remaining transparent about the nature of its musical works.
Annual Editions
Rather than continuously modifying one collection without preserving its history, I introduced the concept of editions.
The initial collection is identified as the 2026 Founding Edition.
Future editions could explore different musical styles, geographic scales, or curatorial approaches.
This also creates opportunities to preserve earlier versions of the project as distinct digital artifacts.
Building a Developer SDK
Another important part of the project is making the atlas accessible to developers.
I published an initial TypeScript package:
@openverb/music-atlas
The package establishes a foundation for integrating World Music Atlas functionality into other applications.
npm install @openverb/music-atlas
The initial SDK supports modern JavaScript environments and is designed around lightweight integration.
It provides a starting point for building applications that interact with the atlas beyond the primary website.
Some potential applications include:
- Interactive geographic experiences
- Educational applications
- Digital exhibitions
- Music discovery interfaces
- Geographic storytelling platforms
This is particularly interesting to me because I also work on OpenVerb, an open execution layer for AI actions.
The broader goal across these projects is to build software that can be reused and extended rather than existing exclusively as isolated applications.
Why Geography and Music?
Geography is often taught visually.
Maps, satellite imagery, photographs, charts, and spatial datasets help us understand the world.
But geographic understanding is not limited to visual information.
Places are also associated with language, sound, stories, traditions, and human experiences.
Music offers another way to engage with geographic subjects.
Imagine an educational experience where students can explore countries on a map, listen to musical interpretations, and then investigate the languages, history, and cultural traditions of those places.
The music becomes an entry point.
The geography provides context.
The combination encourages exploration.
This is where I see the broader opportunity for projects like the World Music Atlas.
AI-assisted music can become a component of interactive knowledge systems, not simply another category of generated content.
What’s Next?
The 2026 Founding Edition establishes the initial geographic collection.
But the architectural possibilities extend much further.
Future expansions could include cities, capitals, regions, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans.
There are also opportunities to explore different musical interpretations of the same places across multiple editions.
On the developer side, I want to continue expanding the SDK and the ways geographic music collections can be integrated into other applications.
The broader vision is a platform where geography, music, storytelling, and software come together to create new forms of digital cultural experiences.
Final Thoughts
Building the World Music Atlas reinforced something I’ve been exploring across several of my software projects:
The most interesting applications of generative AI may not be the generated artifacts themselves, but the systems we build around them.
A generated song is one artifact.
A curated musical collection is another level.
A geographic interface that organizes those works into an explorable atlas introduces an entirely different experience.
And a developer SDK creates opportunities for that experience to extend into other applications.
The World Music Atlas is an experiment in what becomes possible when those layers come together.
The world is not just something we can map.
It’s also something we can explore through sound.
🌍 Explore the World Music Atlas: https://openmusicatlas.org
🎵 Explore Topics Archive: https://topicsarchive.openverb.org
💻 Developer SDK: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@openverb/music-atlas
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I’m Roman Hancel, a geospatial developer and creator of the World Music Atlas, Topics Archive, OpenVerb, and several other software projects exploring the intersection of geography, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure.
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