I love music, and I love data. So I decided to go back and examine my music trends in 2011 to see what I was listening to ::

• Finals at SVA, April and December, generated large listening spikes.
• You can see when I started at Nike in mid June and was too new to be comfortable putting headphones on at work. Plus, I hadn’t found a way to scrobble my music on my work computer yet.
• My trip to Colorado on the 4th of July sees a spike in music consumption, as I spent many hours on airplanes and trains, as well as DJing by the pool at Jakes.
• A lot of my late summer was spent on TurnTable.fm, which lead to a higher variety of songs being played, rather than full albums. This is represented by many thin layers, rather than fewer, thicker layers
• Early September was my breakup with Claire, and I remember not really listening to music during this time. I’m not entirely sure why, but its incredibly apparent.
• I purchased Spotify premium in mid September and saw my music consumption continue to rise from there on out.
• Mid October was the Jay-Z / Kanye West concert, in which I listened to The Throne, as well as their individual albums, pretty much nonstop for 2 weeks before and a month after.

This visualization was created over at lastgraph via my last.fm data, which has consistently logged my music listening from turntable, itunes, and spotify. You can view a high resolution version here.

I’ve been slowly writing some Processing code to create some additional visualizations in the pattern of my listening, such as time of day, and weather compared to genre. Unfortunately, with thesis scheduled to take up all of my time between now and May, I might not get back to it until the summer.

And if you’re interested in what I thought the best music of 2011 was, check out my playlist.