Metasyn is an interface that allows visitors to explore the collection of contemporary art in Roskiilde. The visualization includes an interactive 3D browser that is among the best I’ve seen. Items are organized in the space as follows:
The objects are lined up vertically by year showing the distribution of objects over time. For a given object, its vertical order is a product of the ‘grade of dominance’ that the related artist has. The objects that are made by artists whose objects are commonly accruing in the collection are placed closer to the ground plane. This results in an organisation where the most dominant artists are represented close to ‘the core’ of the structure, while the less known artists ends up in the periphery. This decision was made to support the impression of exploring the unknown in the outer areas of the collection, and to increase chances additionally that the museum’s choice of popular artists are promoted.
Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.
Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these is the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, recently published in Bomb Magazine.
He also has a great infographic of various rock genres:
In fact, he has a number of wonderfully realized visualizations covering various art figures and movements from Andy Warhol to Avant Garde. You can access and view the entire list from this page.
These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings
Eventually, Michael intends to produce a book of these charts, and has a placeholder website that should have more details once they’re available.
There’s also an extensive collection of pictures available on his Flickr group.
Hot of the presses, here are the sides for the tutorial that Justin and Paul are presenting at ISMIR 2009 on October 26.
Note that the live presentation will include many demonstrations and videos of visualizations that just are not practical to include in a PDF. If you have the chance, be sure to check out the tutorial at ISMIR in Kobe on the 26th.
Lee Byron 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.
Lee’s graphic is a stacked graph where each colored layer represents a musician, progressing from left to right through the eighteen month span growing wider when listening was more frequent, and skinnier when it was not. The layout method is unique, dubbed a “Stream Graph,” it acts to have the least amount of distortion to the graph and is responsible for generating the elegant non-symmetrical curves
Visualizing Music 