The World in Tune
By: Frans Geurts
Tags: Data Visualization, Dataviz, Iib, Deloitte

Screenshot of ‘The World in Tune’

Arranging the world by la-ti-da (instead of latitude)

Early this year I made a big decision. I quitted freelancing and started at Deloitte, a big consultancy firm. A major switch, in several ways. But I felt this was the step I had to take. Working as a freelancer can be ‘lonely’ at times. I missed the possibility of cooperating with bright people. Besides, quite some clients I served for several years in -more or less- the same dataviz projects. It tended to get boring, now and then. So when Deloitte showed up and did an offer, I didn’t hesitate.

The challenge in consultancy is to gather all individual skills of a divers team in a client project. Our ambition is to develop and implement more advanced visualizations at clients. But reality is that at the end of the day we’re building dashboards and less advanced visualizations. Visualizations that provide unknown & valuable insights. Undoubtedly extremely important, but it doesn’t really raise the bar for data visualization within Deloitte. Yet. The Information Is Beautiful Awards gave our team a big opportunity to step up.

The result is: The World in Tune. A scroll story in which we rearranged 60 countries of the world in to new continents, based on the music preferences of their habitants.

(Note that that due to the extensive animations and visualizations, this scrollstory can only be opened in non-mobile devices with a minimal horizontal screen resolution of 1400 pixels.)

In this article I’ll share the phases we went through in this project:

1. Brainstorming

2. Gathering the data

3. Data discovery

4. Sketching

5. Programming

Phase 1: Brainstorming

Of course it is important to let all your ideas run freely during a brainstorm. But it is as equally important to know what you are looking for. That is why we defined some criteria about the topic:

1. The topic is big enough;

2. Data could be gathered relatively easy;

3. The topic is recognizable to most people.

Pretty fast after that ‘music’ came across. But we immediately identified one major downside: everybody is building Data Visualizations around this theme at the moment. The IronViz theme was indeed: music. That wasn’t really in our advantage. But, we came up with a really nice hypothesis and it simply was the best idea we had. Besides: ‘the chase is better than the catch’. We should give it a try.

Our hypothesis:

Are people that living in countries close together (e.g. same continent) listening to the same music?

And if not -what we expect-

How would the world look like if we’d arrange the world based on la-ti-da instead of latitude?

Phase 2: Gathering the data

Music streaming service Spotify has currently over 252 million users. Every day, Spotify tracks the 50 most popular songs for 60 countries. Besides, Spotify provides 13 different features for every track on their platform. With an API we were able to scrape all these songs and features. Within a week we had the data set we needed.

Phase 3: Data discovery

As said before, Spotify provides 13 audio features for every track. We did a deep dive into these features. We performed correlation analysis on these characteristics. The correlations of Danceability, Valence (musical positiveness) and Tempo (BPM) were deemed sufficiently independent to continue analysis with only these characteristics. After that, we normalized the characteristics between 0 and 1 to prepare for our algorithm. By bringing these scores together, we identified a musical DNA per country.

Next, our algorithm -K-means clustering- sorted them according to their musical DNA. Six new clusters, e.g. new continents emerged. For example ‘Sad East Asia’ consisting of South Asian countries only, having the saddest music of all. Or ‘The Kanye West’: countries from all over the world, who like their music score high on Danceability, moderate on Tempo and low on Valence. And then there is ‘Akon’. Nobody listens to music like they do in Japan, leaving it all to itself. Something you might call ‘Lonely’.

Phase 4: Sketching

Parallel to phase 3 we started sketching. Sketching is a really powerful approach in data visualization. It is a really quick, iterative, activity. It shows really fast whether a given type of visualization works (for the given data) or not. After a lot of -rather bad- sketches, we came up with a first circular view. In this view, the 60 countries would be arranged based on continents. At this phase, our working title was ‘Beat of the world’. From a visual point of view, we would like to stay close to music. ’But also to beat. We agreed that the metaphor of an equalizer fitted perfectly right here.

We also agreed that it would be a scrollstory. With every scroll a new layer of information appears. A really powerful method that allows for telling compelling stories. This gave us the ability to build up our story one piece of information at a time. We guide the viewer and show and explain the insights we gained in the data discovery phase.

From a design point of view, we committed to the style and colors of the Deloitte brand. And although a lot of these visual assumptions are written down in a style guide, they still provide some flexibility. Within these boundaries, we managed to come with a clear, bright and tight design for the visualizations and the UX/UI.

Based on these principles and conditions, we were ready to build.

Phase 5: Programming

We built an equalizer that ‘revealed’ the DNA per country. To make it more tangible (or audible, to be precise), we embedded a Spotify player showing the most and the least danceable song in the data set. Thereafter, in the next scrolls, the measures Valence and Tempo follow.

In the meantime we already discovered that our hypothesis was right. Countries really differ a lot. It really was the most important step in the process. After all, it is the backbone of our story.

So the next step was to rearrange countries to a new continent. We visually really struggled on this part of the visualization. We couldn’t just simply give countries a new spot on the map. Especially since we had data for only 60 countries. Eventually, we came up with the idea to lay these countries flat. It showed that it’s even more obvious that countries that are close together are not always similar. But since we were rearranging countries from existing continents to new continents, we felt that is was necessary to show a map in between. To show that some clusters of countries are really remarkable. Japan, for instance, is a (rather sad) cluster on its own. To emphasize the transition, we used thin white lines that fade out after the animation. All these animations (and those appointed before) were supported by the brilliant phrases of our copywriter. He came up with some really cool names for new continents, with a lot of humor, like Sad East Asia and The Kanye West.

At this point our explanatory story ends. We showed how the world would look like when it was arranged based on music. In other words: The World in Tune.

The last step we would like to add, is to make it personal. What’s in it for me? The story is initially on a pretty high level of countries and continents. But an important questions that viewers could have is: where do I belong (based on my music preferences).

Therefore we added three DJ sliders, corresponding with the three features. This allows viewers to customize their own music preference. In return, they get back the continent where they should live, based on their musical DNA and a track list tailored to that preferences.

Finally: The chase is better than the catch

It’s a quote I shared with my team before. Of course, our main goal is winning. And we’re a pretty competitive team. But the biggest profit at this stage is teaming up with a bunch of really talented people with different skills. Don’t forget: the entire visualization was build outside office hours. But a lot of good food, club mate and a good challenge can get a lot going on. It provides expansion of our Advanced Data Visualization portfolio and will pay back in the future. When we deliver these kind of solutions for our clients, even more.

We confirmed our hypothesis that inhabitants of neighboring countries do not listen to the same music. We delivered a complete story for the viewer to read including something for them, to see with which new continent they match. Last but not least we are proud of the way we visualized the data so that it provided new insights that otherwise would have remain hidden.

The result can be viewed on: www.theworldintune.com

Note that that due to the extensive animations and visualizations, this scrollstory can only be opened in non-mobile devices with a minimal horizontal screen resolution of 1400 pixels.

Frans Geurts