Gaining Musical Insights: Visualizing Multiple Listening Histories

Listening histories are rich sources of implicit information. Combining listening histories of multiple users allows comparisons in musical taste and discovery of new music, though few existing work specifically addresses this issue. In this paper we present two interactive visualizations which give users a deeper insight into consent and dissent in their listening behaviors, and help them to compare their musical tastes. HisFlocks shows overlaps in genre and artist in certain time periods and LoomFM illustrates sequential listening patterns. Our first feedback on these systems was very promising and we plan to extend our concepts to broader scenarios with a greater number of listening histories.