Sunday 5 April 2009

Since ISMIR I've been listening to...

I'm currently a bit fascinated with different ways of representing my listening history.

I really like LastGraph which was inspired by Lee Byron. The graphs show how my listening preferences (and in particular how often I listen to my favorite artists) change over time.

I also like these visualizations by Martin. They show how artists move up or down over time in my chart.

Recently I tried to visualize my top artist chart using artist images, and readjusting their sizes so they correspond to how often I've listened to each artist respectively. Here's what I've been listening to since my last blogpost at ISMIR 2008:

Kaki King (22 plays)Ani DiFranco (22 plays)Cake (22 plays)Yo-Yo Ma (23 plays)Nick Drake (24 plays)Brian Eno (24 plays)Robert Lockwood Jr. (24 plays)Davy Graham (24 plays)Kimya Dawson (25 plays)Antônio Carlos Jobim (25 plays)Radiohead (25 plays)Barney Kessel (28 plays)Baden Powell (30 plays)Art Tatum (30 plays)Pablo Casals (43 plays)Herb Ellis (51 plays)Julian Bream (53 plays)John Fahey (58 plays)Essie Jain (74 plays)Jack Johnson (79 plays)

I think this montage says it all: I like black and white music from solo artists playing guitars.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

awesome stuff .. and now your recent twitter posts make more sense. I've thought about doing this too ... it is such a better way than tag clouds because even a tiny "death cab for cutie" is going to be bigger than a big U2. I assume that the area of the images is proportional to your listening (and not the width or height).

Elias said...

Yes, it's the area that's proportional.

Jeremy said...

Hilarious!

Unknown said...

You could try using a Treemap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemap) or one of it's layout algorithms. Or maybe not. I like the montage feel of your attempt.

Elias said...

Tristan, thanks for the hint. I thought treemap cant deal with constraints regarding the aspect ratios of each rectangle?