More album charts
December 13, 2006
I liked the Fox Confessor chart but wanted to put it in context of other albums I like. These are all at the same scale so you can compare the lengths of the albums.
| Sparkline | Album Title | Album Artist |
|---|---|---|
 |
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood | Neko Case |
 |
Dark Side of the Moon | Pink Floyd |
 |
Extraordinary Machine | Fiona Apple |
 |
Dire Straits | Dire Straits |
 |
Little Earthquakes | Tori Amos |
 |
Good News for People Who Love Bad News | Modest Mouse |
If the last chart’s spacing looks slightly strange, it’s because that album has two very short tracks that turn into rounding errors at smaller scales of the chart. When I turn this into an algorithm, I’ll have to set some sort of minimum size. Dark Side also has a gray square. This marks a track that’s a brief interlude or skit rather than a full-fledged musical piece in its own right. These tend to be more common on hip-hop and rap albums, but occasionally — as with the Modest Mouse album — they pop up elsewhere.
Update: I also turned the first line blue. The tracks are ranked from 1-5 rather than 0-4 because I need at least one bar to show the length of a track. But psychologically I think people want a zero score because a “1″ always sounds like you’re giving the track some tiny bit of credit. Turning the baseline blue helps give that impression, I think, and also helps emphasize the horizontal dimension. I’m open to other suggestions, though.
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December 13th, 2006 at 8:38 am
If I understand the charts correctly, I’m interpreting that as a rather positive review for Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine. If so, I agree wholeheartedly. What a fantastic album!
December 13th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Tufte Alert: Album Charts…
Thudfactor has come up with this nifty chart to express how much he likes an album, track by track. Pictured below, “Dark Side of the Moon”: Is that Tufte Rock? Well turn it up! Speaking of charts, Junk Charts reprinted……
December 13th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Yes, Jess! Extraordinary Machine is probably my new favorite album — I don’t get a new favorite album all that often, either.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Very Tufte of you. Did your own ratings surprise you? They surprise me.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Wait…
It’s not as Tufte as I thought it was.
Thirty seconds of continuous orgasm is way better than 15 minutes naked and sweaty in a room full of mosquitos.
I assert that your graph only has one axis.
December 15th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
That’s interesting, Malice — would you care to expound further and take it beyond mere assertion?
December 16th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Now that I’m sober and capable of forming coherent sentences…
I don’t think the length of a song by itself is a measurement of anything important. In the examples you provide, ‘Little Earthquakes’ jumps out as the leader. After closer examination, it seems to be a tossup between ‘Extraordinary Machine’ and ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’
If you really want to be a Tufte guy, your graphs need more or less instantly convey their meaning.
The preceding sentence is mostly superfluous; I just wanted to use the phrase “Tufte guy.”
I think this is a cool idea, but if you’re going to use time in your graph, it should measure something in addition to the length of the song, if that makes any sense; for instance, how long you suffered before getting to the next track.
The previous paragraph is composed of precisely one sentence. Shame on me.
December 16th, 2006 at 8:01 am
s/need more/need to more/
December 16th, 2006 at 8:57 am
I had in mind the vertical dimension more or less expressed how much I enjoyed the particular track. My intent was to suggest the distribution of good songs on an album, the relative lengths of tracks, etc.
I wanted to show the time dimension for just that reason — to make a map of the album, so you could see the peaks and valleys of experience.
But I think you’re right; I do seem to be overemphasizing the horizontal here.
My initial pass had the different ranks color-coded, but it looked a little carnival-like. That might be fixed by better color choice, though. Do you think additional colors would re-emphasize the vertical dimension?
December 16th, 2006 at 9:04 am
I’ve got a lot of driving to do today, which will give time to ponder.
First knee-jerk reaction I came up with just now:
Normalize the album lengths. That will remove the horizontal distraction. I’m not sure what that gets you, though.
I’ll get back to it this evening or tomorrow.
December 17th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Malice, why would you want to _remove_ information from the chart? Why not just equalize the song lengths while you’re at it? What would the “time” axis measure _other_ than song length?
I think the chart as it stands conveys information without undue explanation. I suppose you could incorporate a “negative” scale below the line.
December 17th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
M-E-L: Where did I suggest removing information from the chart?
Thud: Color is a good idea. It would give you a third axis. If you normalize, you’ll still get song length relative to album length, height gives you how well you liked a song, and color could be something like “how fast it makes you want to drive” or “how depressing it is.”
December 17th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Well, the color wouldn’t give me a third axis — it’d just emphasize the second (track score). I think what M E-L sees as “removing information” is normalizing the chart length; what you’re removing is the comparison of one album’s length to another, which is also why I’m resistant to normalizing the charts.
I think an excellent 70-minute album should be obviously different from an excellent 30-minute album, but if you normalize on that you lose the distinction.
I do see, however, that the charts seem to over-emphasize time; perhaps scaling vertically would also help. If I were to make the charts actual sparklines we’d lose shorter tracks on web pages (TMBG would _never_ read coherently), but sparklines aren’t that great for low-resolution displays anyway.
December 17th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Let’s say (for the sake of argument) that you loved the entire Ring Cycle (very long), and also “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow,” (half an hour). Normalizing the lengths would tell us that you loved them both, but would remove something important about the way in which you enjoy both albums. Hence, you would be removing information.
December 19th, 2006 at 8:47 am
I think measuring the length of the song it critical to the success of this method…
Sometimes it makes a difference in the workflow of a song by how long it is.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:59 am
OK, here’s a tweak that might help: a weighted average line for the whole album. Figure the weighted average based on the relative length of each song x your score of that song. Then put a red line across the whole album at that height. Am I making any sense here?