Developed during a 2017 hackathon, this app allows you to draw landscapes based on your last 50 listens on Spotify
If you’re a regular listener of streaming music on Spotify, you might be pleased to know that there’s an app that turns your listening habits into colorful landscapes, graphically representing the playlists you listen to. This app is called Musicscape. The name says it all: it’s the synthesis of “music” and “landscape”, music and landscape.
Musicscape uses artificial intelligence to process the last 50 songs you’ve heard on Spotify and returns a landscape that changes based on the type of music you listen to. Basically, there are “rock” landscapes, “pop” landscapes, “dance” landscapes, and so on. But that’s not all: Musicscape is also able to understand the mood related to each song you listen to, dividing the songs into happy and sad. The app was developed at Spotify’s 2017 devX hackathon in Stockholm by Nadia Campo Woytuk and Stefan Aleksik and is now in a stable and fully functional version.
How Musicscape works
To start using Musicscape to create landscapes from our playlists we first need to install the app and login with our Spotify account. From then on, the app starts analyzing the songs we listen to and creating landscapes, mostly mountainous, in which the height and frequency of the mountains reflect the speed and power, but also the bass and treble, of the songs.
The colors of the landscape depend on the key of the song, while songs with major chords usually return daytime landscapes and those in minor ones nighttime landscapes. The depth of the landscape and the amount of “mountain ranges”, on the other hand, depends on how often we use Spotify. All this, put together, means that almost never two users will have similar landscapes and that even the same user, based on his recent Spotify usage, will always have different landscapes.
The interesting thing is that Musicscape, after generating the landscape, even explains it to you. So, for example, the background is red because you recently listened to cheerful music, nocturnal because the music was in the lower range, the mountains are very jagged because you listened to very energetic music, but because you listened to little music in the last 24 hours the image shows only two rows of mountains.