Musicovery combines two online music suggestion platforms (MusicPlasma and Pandora) into a visual music discovery system and internet radio. It does so by taking the music information and connection system created by Pandora and combining it with MusicPlasma’s novel interface for music discovery. What you get is a new system in which users can choose different musical categories as well as moods spatially on a map of all songs that fall into your current category. The user selects a central node to work off of, and Musicovery selects songs that fall within the proximity of your chosen node based off song popularity and mood.
I chose this visualization because I honestly found it really useful, even aside from the assignment itself. I’ve been listening to the service for the past hour and have already found new enjoyable music that I’ve never heard before.
It also serves as a great example of a dynamic visualization of data, allowing the user to select completely different data sets to predict from. This allows for the user to discover new music in proximity to songs that they like in order to broaden their musical horizons. As well, viewing favorite songs from a perspective of mood and genre all in relation to each other presents a unique new perspective on the data itself.
World of Music was created by mining data from the Yahoo Music service and using it to create and map a network of connections between various artists found on the service. Artists that are more popular or have shared listeners are mapped according to space in relation to each other and color of popularity.
I found this visualization very interesting because of its immediate beauty but ultimate failure at doing that much with it. It is essentially a static visualization, only allowing the user to view the network as a whole and the ability to zoom in on certain parts of the network to see more detailed information. So, while it does make for a nice display and gives an interesting look at artist relationships, it doesn’t allow the user to do much than admire how pretty it looks.
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