archGFX

Music and Graphs

(click for the fullsize, it's awesome)

I love last.fm. And I love data visualization. Music + Data = Supah Sexeh. That's why I read Emo + Beer = Busted Career: P4M-style snark is boring without the graphs and charts).

A couple months ago there was that Waterloo Engineering project that made pie charts of how eclectic your tastes were. Nothing wrong with it, just not exciting. that, and it could only connect to last.fm for like a week, it tells everyone they don't have charts now.

I first saw Lee Byron's histograph on information aesthetics, and was seriously tempted to pay the man to make me one of them, although at the same time, I wondered if it was possible to extract the data mechanically. Fortunately, someone much smarter than me had the same thought, so you can get your own wave histogram chart here.

The history chart is fantastic. I love the way it reflects my life. you can clearly see when I changed jobs in August 2006, and stopped being able to listen to my own music at work. I ran the chart seperately for just that period, but even at that, it's a pretty dense year and a half:

Unfortunately that lull, despite the attempted resurgence in December, means that there's little documentation of the gradual shift in my tastes away from indie, and towards metal. When summer hours started this June, the list of bands is almost completely different:

what's abundantly clear, though, is how I listen to music. I jump from obsession to obsession, with little continuity in between. Dredg doesn't show up as an even ribbon, just a more common hotspot. Opeth is the exception, since their songs are so long. They rarely peek(or peak) out of the chart, but they're always present. There's probably some better graph to show the frequency and repetition in my taste, rather than ebb and flow. the pictures are still hot, though.

h/t jark