Tuning in on My Streaming Habits
Music plays a significant role in our lives. It allows us to express ourselves, relax, and connect with others. I personally love spending my day streaming my favorite artists and discovering new projects from smaller creators. If I can play some tunes, I do it. I was curious to see how my listening habits varied day-by-day so I tracked what songs I listened to for five days straight, linking my Spotify account to an application that would help me do just that! I knew it would be interesting to see how my results align with my days as some days are predominantly dedicated to school while others, I am working a majority of the time.
After looking through the data and organizing it in my notes app, what I found was a bit surprising. On average, I actually do not listen to as many songs as I thought! In my head I felt like I spent a significant amount of time streaming, but that was not reflected in the results.
In the first visualization, “Music Through Time” I created five different clocks with these waves that represent the number of songs listened to per hour. The green/turquoise waves represent the afternoon while the magenta represents the morning. Looking back at the visualization, it is interesting to see how different each day is from one another! No one clock looks the same — or even similar. There does not seem to be any specific pattern in my listening habits. I decided to opt out of drawing the clock hands in order to avoid confusion when viewing the visualization. The inclusion of a scale/axis makes it much more comprehensible for the audience which is why I decided to incorporate it.
To offer a different perspective with the data gathered, I decided to create a second work titled, “Percent Played.” In this visualization, there are five phones that represent each day tracked. The parts of the screen filled in with pink show what percent of the day was spent playing music. I wanted to make this visually more interesting, so I included the exact number of songs played — each squiggly line represents 5 songs. I like the way this one turned out because it is very easy to understand at first glance what is being shown. The colors along with the writing (including the exact percent for each day) allow for the viewer to quickly grasp the concept of the visualization.
