Piano Notes
A visualization of what parts of the piano keyboard are played the most in well-known classical music pieces
This series of posters visualizes data on how frequently specific keys on a piano keyboard are played for a given classical music piece. Each circle represents one key and the size of the circle encodes how often that key was pressed. The horizontal position of the circle correlates to the location of the key on the keyboard. Additionally, color is used to represent the pitch of the key (i.e., whether it was a C, D, E, etc) and vertical position is used to signify whether or not the note is an accidental (i.e., a sharp or a flat).
To generate this data, I downloaded MusicXML files for each piece and then used the Python library music21 to parse the files and tabulate the number of times a specific note occurred. I then used d3.js in an Observable notebook to build my visualizations. Finally, I exported each chart as a .svg file and polished and laid them out in Adobe Illustrator.
