music

Travel to different parts of the country, and you hear different types of music on replay. Josh Katz for The Upshot mapped the regionality based on the popularity of artists…

Artist Nicholas Rouguex visualized some musical scores in his project Off the Staff. I can’t read music but I can parse it. The talent of reading music has always escaped…

Last year the New York Times interviewed Justin Bieber, Diplo, and Skrillex about how they put together their song Where Are Ü Now. NYT coupled the video with data visualization…

Musicmap is an attempt to show the history of music over time and how it came to be what it is today. Musicmap attempts to provide the ultimate genealogy of…

Glenn McDonald attempts to graph the musical space in its entirety on a two-dimensional scale. He calls it Every Noise at Once. This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated,…

Quantified Selfie is a project to find narratives in an individual’s personal dataset. It’s not about optimization or self-improvement. It’s about facets of the everyday, which is my favorite kind…

The Year that Music Died from Polygraph is an animated timeline that shows the Billboard top 5 songs since 1956, all the while playing the top song during a given…

A fun one from Interactive Things that shows cover songs with a galaxy metaphor: The panorama view shows the 50 top songs as individual planetary systems with the original work…

A visual layer set on top of the video interview makes the feelings understandable.

Audio Landscape is a novel music visualizer that constructs a landscape based on the MP3 that you give it. As you fly overhead, you can see the mountains constructed in…

In the first song of his music experiment Data-Driven DJ, visual artist Brian Foo used median household income data to create a song that represents a ride on a New…

In Soundweaving, Zsanett Szirmay used embroidery as a score to feed into a music box. Each stitching square is a punch hole, and because of the repeating patterns in “embroidered…

It’s been known for decades that the sounds that whales make show patterns and have a certain musicality to them. David Rothenberg and Mike Deal talk about the history of…

Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement. by Tahir Hemphill explores rappers’ geographic mentions in their lyrics. Geographic mentions from the complete bodies of work of 12 rappers were extracted using the language…

This is what you get when you cross a histogram and piano keys to show note distribution of songs. It’s the pianogram. View examples such as Fur Elise or the…

This is beautiful to watch. Graham Roberts, Daniel J. Wakin, and others from the New York Times, along with OpenShades, sat down with the Kronos Quartet to collect point cloud…

Beat Blox is a student project by Per Holmquist from Beckmans College of Design. Blocks are placed on a turntable, and beats sound accordingly. Super playful. [via CAN]…

Media artist Nick Hardeman’s audio visualization app Bass Shapes was rejected by the Mac App Store because “it’s not useful.” So Hardeman released the software as a free OS X…

Watch the notes rain down on those piano keys. Made with MIDItrail, a MIDI player with a 3-d visualization component. The program (and this video) has been around for a…

Matt Daniels compared rappers’ vocabularies to find out who knows the most words. Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he…

George & Jonathan used an interactive audio visualization for their recent album George & Jonathan III. This is a fun one. You can rotate the camera as you like, as…

The Pyro Board is a matrix of 2,500 flames that have controllable intensity, which can be used as an audio visualizer. Yeah, really. Just watch the video below. [via Colossal]…

Movoto mapped music preference for various genres, across the United States. We calculated musical taste scores using data from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Bureau of Labor Statistics,…

Two Google research groups, Big Picture and Music Intelligence, got together and made a music timeline baby. The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how…

Jessica Edmondson visualized the history of rock music, from foundations in the pre-1900s to a boom in the 1960s and finally to what we have now. Nodes represent music styles,…

When you hear “piracy data” and “music” in the same sentence, it usually ends with exorbitant fines. Iron Maiden took a different route. In the case of Iron Maiden, still…

I’m not entirely sure how to interpret this music video from Franz Ferdinand, but I’m taking it as a critique on internet culture, with less-than-meaningful charts playing a part. There…

Do singer-songwriters age well like a fine wine, or does quality decline with age? Kyle Biehle analyzed fan ratings by age. I understand all of the reasons for not comparing…

If you listen to the radio long enough, you’ve probably noticed that many songs sound similar or remind of you of a song you’ve heard before. Hooktheory shows you just…

You know those songs that you love so much that you cry because they’re over? Well, cry no more with the Inifinite Jukebox by Paul Lamere. Inspired by Infinite Gangnam…