Patrick Gage Kelley

Actually, quite a few times. According to my profile on last.fm I have listened to 89238 songs since I joined in August of 2004. This means I now have over three years of many of the songs I listen to recorded. I say many, and not all, because sometimes I am listening to songs in the car, or on an ipod, or without an internet connection, or possibly at someone else’s house. But for the most part, I would guess about two-thirds of the music I have listened to in the last three years is recorded here.

Last semester in my Information Visualization course a fellow student, Lee Byron, for one of his projects designed a Last.fm viewer which can be seen here. This is of course very cool and I immediately wanted one of my own.

Enter LastGraph, a web application that if given your last.fm username will generate this “wave graph” for free (and it is pretty fast). All the images in this post are generated from that service. You can read more about it at his website, but there are some major differences as Lee’s work was done in processing this has been converted to python and is using amazonS3 for hosting and a custom graphics library that Andrew Godwin wrote.

So, it has been really interesing to look back at this, and notice trends, like the above shot which is clearly some sort of pretty angsty feminist stage I went through with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fiona Apple, Ani DiFranco, and Jewel (ignoring the Kings of Convenience).

Also, it is good at picking out events in my life. You can see the longest gap of no music was this past July, while I was on my trip with Amy, because while there was music on the trip, there was very little internet and also as you remember a lack of ipods.

While I do think Lee’s implementation of this was a lot cleaner (didn’t have the noisy lines, probably dealt with special characters better than simply omitting them) this is pretty fun, and so I encourage any Last.fm user to go try this.

Also hopefully when I have some time, since there is a huge amount of data here (at least for me) I will work through this and maybe come up with some alternative visualization, because I feel like too many artists are being lost in the tiny lines, the little waves that seem to make up the majority of my graph.

Also if anyone is interested in my graph I have put up the “red” version as a pdf here for you to download here-big! 8MBs if you would like to look at it in more detail.