This screen displays a single day of my listening history. Each bar in the visualisation represents an individual 'song play'. Hovering over the song play will show you the name of the song and the artist. The width of the bars represents how long the song was played for. The visualisation is designed to fill the horizontal space. Therefore, the positioning on the x axis does not encode any information - the next song immediately follows, even if there was a gap in reality, and a day with fewer songs played on it will have wider bars. The height of the bars indicates how popular a song and the artist are in my library. The dark grey ■ bars show how popular the artist is and the light grey ■ bars bars how popular the song is. The visual representation is supposed to be evocative of a sound wave.
This screen displays a whole year of my listening history. Each long line you see is actually a combination of hundreds or thousands of individual song plays. These lines continue in a single direction until an artist appears in my library for the first time. At this point the direction of the line turns 90° to the left. Through this visualisation you can see the episodic nature at which I discover and listen to new music, often spending long periods of time listening to artists I have already encountered and then testing out the water by listening to multiple new artists in close proximity. Feel free to explore the animation option and see the path of my music be painted for each year. The colours selected for each year are purely an aesthetic decision and the design of this visualisation was heavily influenced by Stefanie Posavec's Writing Without Words project and intended to mimic the meandering paths my music listening can take.