A lilac sky, jagged mountains and a big yellow sun.
This is how musicScapes draws the last 50 songs I've listened to on Spotify.
This application, created by developers Nadia Campo Woytuk and Stefan Aleksik, can be used from the browser on mobiles and computers and works with the user's authorization so that the program has access to the latest songs we have heard on Spotify.
And from them, it generates a colorful landscape.
The designer and artist Nadia Campo (28 years old) explains that the idea came up in 2017 during a programming marathon (or
hackathon
) promoted by Spotify in Sweden, where she resides.
The two developers created the app over the weekend of the event.
While Aleksik was in charge of the code that connects musicScapes to Spotify, Campo was responsible for the appearance of the project.
“Spotify gave us access to their API (Application Programming Interface) and to the last 50 songs listened to," explains Campo to
Verne
. "We could have done something that allowed the visualization of data directly, but I wanted something more personal and abstract, that had to do with emotions ”.
Did they see that Spotify build a landscape for you according to the music you listen to?
this is mine pic.twitter.com/s0NuKcCet7
- lule🐉 (@soberxblack) February 2, 2021
On February 2, the tweeter @soberxblack published a tweet showing one of the landscapes that this application creates, and has exceeded 40,000 interactions in less than a week.
Campo says that it is not the first time that it has happened and that, although the project seems a bit old, from time to time it becomes popular again in networks.
However, the artist has no idea how many people in total have accessed the platform to generate her custom Spotify landscape.
The app works like this: when entering the musicScapes website, the user is asked to give their permission for the application to access Spotify data.
"Everything is developed internally, so the developers do not have any personal information about the user.
It is important to be clear about this, ”explains Campo.
Once this permission is granted, musicScapes receives the last 50 songs that the user has listened to and creates the landscape from them.
This is the explanation of my musicScape
Although the main characteristics behind the landscape do not change, there is scope to introduce random modifications in the tones of the colors and the shapes of the elements.
Spotify data indicates, for example, the tone of the music or the number of songs that have been listened to in recent days.
With this information, the musicScapes code is able to create a landscape that varies in number of mountains, whether it is day or night, and in colors, depending on the type of music.
In addition to the landscape, the application also displays a text with an explanation about the generated drawing.
For example, a purple sky indicates that your music is related to feelings of sadness or anger, two mountains mean that you listen to music infrequently, and light red mountains indicate that you have heard more music in the key of me.
Campo highlights that people may not associate the same colors that the landscape gives to the feelings described, since for the project this happened arbitrarily: “It was a very fast and more experimental project, so the choice of colors and of the forms is not based at all on research or on theories that associate colors with feelings.
It is based on the intuition that we had at the time ”.
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