Experiment 1 / Playlist Visualiser

About

A playlist is more than just a list of songs. It is a map of moods, habits, and intimate rhythms. When platforms extract these signals as data, they become part of our digital identity, a computational profile built not from what we say, but from what we listen to.

Playlist visualiser translates a Spotify playlist into a composite visual identity. The system extracts features from the uploaded playlist URL and transforms them into a shifting field of orbs to visualise listening habits. It reveals how personal taste becomes encoded as data, fluid in appearance yet shaped by the simplifying logic of algorithmic classification.

Visual Archive

Process Breakdown

⑴ Paste Playlist URL: Users begin by pasting their Spotify playlist URL into the input field. This URL allows the system to retrieve track-level audio features such as energy, valence, tempo, acousticness, danceability, and more.

⑵ Load Playlist: Processes the playlist and produces a field of shifting orbs. Each orb corresponds to a statistical property of the playlist. Together they form a composite visual that represents how the system "reads" the user's listening habits.

⑶ Save Button: Captures the current visual state and downloads the image locally. A thumbnail version is stored in the browser's internal archive so users can revisit later.

⑷ Archive Button: Opens a gallery of all previously generated visuals. This allows users to compare how different playlists produce different computed visuals.

⑸ Reset View Button: Clears the canvas and returns the system to intial state and allow users to load a new playlist or re-explore their own.

⑹ System Classification Panel: System display of categories it infers from the playlist such as gender, age, and genre. This demonstrates how platforms reduce complex listening habits into demographic labels, how taste can be simplified into segments through the mechanism of algorithmic profiling.

Demo

p5.js experiment demo
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