A data analysis of music samples

This is a guest post by I’m Emanuele Conti, a freelance graphic designer and co-founder of Tuxtax.

Creating a Music Infographic

For this self-initiated project, I wanted to combine my passions for music and data by creating an infographic for music.

I used www.whosampled.com as the source for my analysis. This site has well-structured pages, with a lot of informations about sampled songs, so it was the right choice for this project. Import.io was extremely helpful in collecting the data I needed.

First, I created a Crawler with all the requested page fields and started crawling the website. Thanks to the versatility of import.io’s tool, and the structured information within the pages, it was easy to fill up the dataset:

Then, I saved my API…

…then exported the collected data!

Building the infographic

The first step was to analyze the dataset with Microsoft Excel in order to create some basic representation of data.

Then, I pasted my dataset into RAW, a web-app developed by DensityDesign, a Politecnico di Milano research lab focused on data visualization.

Finally, I used Gephi software, an amazing tool for network analysis:

All that was left to do then was past all the different SVGs into my Adobe Illustrator file ao I could organize and elaborate the different graphics into a definitive visualization:

It was a challenging project, but really interesting too!

We have a video teaser too…

…and a Behance review!

About the author

Emanuele is a freelance graphic designer for Visual Pollution Lab. In addition, he co-founded Tuxtax, a data analysis and visualization “start-up” based in Milan (Italy) and Lausanne (Switzerland). He and his three partners – a journalist, a data scientist and a web developer – have combined their skills to create “The Next Little Thing in Data Visualization”.

Follow him on Twitter: @emanuele_conti

Follow Tuxtax: @thetuxtax