Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Visualizing Personal Audio Histories

I'm always a sucker for a clever data visualization project -- anything that turns an unwieldy mass of information into a clean and intuitive graphic. The "aha!" moment is my favorite.

I'm also a huge music fan so here's one that sparked my interest.
Lee Byon, an information designer at Facebook, created this graphic to map his listening history on Last.fm.


Unfortunately all I have is a partial screen shot, so definitely click through to the article to get a better view.

Here's how it works: imagine time as the horizontal axis; each ribbon represents a different artist, color-coded based on how long the creator has been a fan (cool blues represent old favorites, while warmer colors represent newer discoveries); the width of the ribbon represents the volume of music heard.

What I love is how much information is immediately apparent. First of all, I like this guy's taste in music, but he seems a little boring: he mostly listens to old favorites -- though he seems to have gotten more experimental since. His listening habits tend to come in phases: there are times when he listens to a lot of music and times when he listens to fairly little; he seems very into particular artists at certain times, but they seldom make a comeback once he tires of them.

Would love to see my own audio history graphic, and compare it to those of my friends. I'm imagining a whole world of music histories that flow in and out of each other like liquid, intersecting, affecting each others musical currents.