Visualizing listening history

Lee Byron, a design/HCI student at CMU, has created this visualization of the listening history of a last.fm user. In this visualization, the x axis is time, and the y axis shows the number of plays associated with various artists. Lee calls this a 'layered histogram'. When plotted on paper, the visualization for 18 months of listening data is about 7 feet long.  The visualization is fascinating way to view how one's listening taste changes over time.  Lee's visualization reminds me of the Genealogy of Rock visualization that uses a similar (but hand drawn) layered histogram to represent the various artists and genres and how their popularities change over time.  Lee also has some other examples of visualizing last.fm listening data.  (Via Information Aesthetics)

Posted on: May 04, 2007

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

Permanent link to this entry

Comments:

You can get something very much similar with last.fm extras: http://www.last.fm/user/C26000/journal/2006/07/30/195693/

Posted by Norman Casagrande on May 04, 2007 at 12:09 PM EDT #

Looks nice. But where's the code? :-o

Posted by Julian on May 04, 2007 at 06:40 PM EDT #

That is a beautiful graph to look at and a great idea to visualize listening history. Seems like Lee Byron is using Processing?

Posted by elias on May 05, 2007 at 07:14 PM EDT #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.

This blog copyright 2010 by plamere