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How tunes are sorted

Old-Time Bubble Map groups 10,278 old-time tunes by what their titles are about: animals, people, places, feelings and more. This page explains the categories and how each tune lands in one.

Why titles?

Old-time tunes are usually catalogued by key, tuning, form, region or the fiddler who played them. Those are in the map’s filters. But the titles tell their own story: mules and possums, sweethearts and soldiers, rivers, trains and whiskey. We looked for an existing scheme that sorts tune titles by subject and didn’t find one. The nearest relatives sort song lyrics: G. Malcolm Laws’ ballad indexes (war, sailors, outlaws, lovers…) and Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. So this taxonomy is our own, built from the titles up.

Principles

  1. A category is what the title is about. Its subject: a person, place, animal, feeling or event. Not just a word in it.
  2. No grammar categories. Colors, numbers, pronouns and adjectives never decide a category alone. “Blue Eyed Girl” is about a girl.
  3. No “other” buckets. A list that misses a name gets the name added. A title with no clear subject goes to Unsorted, where it can be seen and reviewed.
  4. One subject per category. Food and Drink are two categories, not one. A name that says one thing twice stays, like Cities & Towns. A lone keyword sits in its parent instead of a group of one.
  5. Forms are a filter, not a subject. Reel, waltz and breakdown are in the form filter. A tune sits under Music or Dance only if the title is about music or dancing.
  6. Sensitive names are placed by a person. Nationalities, ethnic groups and slurs never file automatically. Slurs are kept in their own group so the map names them honestly.
  7. Every fixed mistake becomes a test. When a tune is found in the wrong place, the title and its right category are added to the test suite, so the fix can't quietly come undone.

How a tune is placed

Categories are groups (Animals › Birds) holding keywords (owl, rooster, whippoorwill). Every tune sits in exactly one place, a keyword or a group, and links to up to three others its title also fits. Three sources decide where, and the first that has an answer wins:

  1. A person. Anyone reviewing a tune can place it by hand, and that choice beats everything else.
  2. An AI suggestion. For titles the matcher couldn’t place, an AI model proposed a category under the same principles. Its suggestions are kept apart from a person’s choices and are checked one by one. It never places nationalities, ethnic groups or slurs.
  3. The title matcher. Each keyword lists the words and phrases it matches and the ones it must not. A title matching several goes to the strongest: subjects first, then describing words.
Phrases, not single words
“Sally Ann” matches as a name; a keyword lists every spelling it accepts, so Cindy and Cinda sit together.
Exclusions
bow skips “Bow Wow” and “Bow-legged”; gate skips “Pearly Gates”, which belongs to Heaven.
Subjects beat descriptions
A noun outranks a describing word: “Lonesome Road” is filed under the road, with a link from lonesome.
Specific beats general
A keyword beats its own group on a tie: “My Old Cabin Home” goes to cabin, not Home.

Where the 10,278 tunes stand today:

The categories

Open a group to see its parts and their busiest keywords.

Spotted a tune in the wrong place?

Tell us where it is and where it belongs. Every correction is placed by a person and becomes a test, so the map gets a little more right each time.

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