Data Portrait

Description

The personal habit I was trying to track is the frequency and the specific time I opened my NeteaseMusic every day. My portrait is read from the top downwards with 7 columns representing Day 1 to Day 7 in one week. The position of the yellow and blue circles in the column represents the specific time that I used NeteaseMusic. If the circle is close to the top of the canvas, that means I listened to music early in the morning. And the length of the wide blue lines pointing to the bottom day numbers is the duration of time I listened to music on NeteaseMusic in the day. As we can see, the longest line is pointing to Day 4 which means I spent a longer time listening to music on Day 4 than on the other days.

Design Process

I’m used to listening to music when I’m studying, working on assignments or walking alone outside because music often makes me feel relaxed, calm and sometimes cheerful. So I think it’s quite interesting to record the frequency I listen to music and visualize how music plays an important role in my life. After collecting the first day data, I found out that only frequencies might not be enough for the required data points. So, I added the time I had spent listening to music every time I opened the NeteaseMusic app to see how long music supported me during the day. After gathering all the data, I translated the data into a JSON file and started to visualize my data on p5js. I chose blue as the main color for the portrait because blue was the most calming and relaxing color to me, just like how music works in my daily life. The movement of the circles are following the beats and rhythms of the background music, which is the song I listen to a lot recently. I found adding music makes the sketch more interesting and more related to my theme, so I tried to work on sound and amplitude to visualize the music. The music visualization is like stars shining in dark blue sky.

Reflection

From the portrait, I found out that I often opened my music app for hours after midnight because I stayed up late working during that week. Music really played an important role in my study. And the duration of time is either a few minutes, or more than one hour long. When it was less than 10 minutes, that was the time I listened to music on my way to the market or study room in schools. One problem in this data portrait I realized later was that I only collected the data when I used NeteaseMusic for it was the most frequently used music app in my phone. But I did spent some time listening to music on other platforms like Youtube or Spotify. I think the portrait will be more detailed and convincing if data from other platforms is also collected.