SufjanViz is a Shiny for R dashboard for exploring the discography of Sufjan Stevens—and for digging into how my own listening behavior relates to underlying characteristics of his music, from loudness and tempo to lyrical sentiment.
A few things you can explore
Every album’s tracks laid out by loudness—Sufjan’s quietest records (the hushed Carrie & Lowell, Seven Swans) stand apart from his maximalist ones at a glance:
Or test whether the data backs up a hunch—for instance, does the lyrical sentiment of a track have anything to do with how much I actually stream it? (Short answer: not really.)
And because the dashboard joins in my Spotify takeout data, it can put my own listening—Wrapped-style—side by side with the audio features above:
Data & tools
- Lyric data and album art from Genius
- Track audio features scraped from Spotify via the spotifyr wrapper
- My personal streaming history from a Spotify data takeout
- Word clouds via Wordcloud2, all other plots in ggplot2
Try it inline
The dashboard is hosted on shinyapps.io and sleeps when idle, so it isn’t embedded by default—click to load it here (it may take ~20 seconds to wake up), or open it in a new tab ↗.