Vinyl Resurgence

For this project I was tasked with gathering and manipulating data to display it in a unique and relevant physical form. I have a passion for collecting vinyl and am interested in the growing resurgence of vinyl purchasing, as well as other analogue forms of music consumption. After gathering an analysing approximately 40 years of music sales data from the US, I translated that into colour coded grids sketched out in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted this data to be displayed as though they were the EQ band of a boom box. The nostalgia of this once-popular piece of electronica resonated with the topic of my research, and I felt it was an impactful and attention-grabbing way to display my data. This involved drawing a blueprint and using a laser cutter to create the exterior box, and creating a small square for each unit of the grid. Using Adafruit Neopixels and an Arduino controller, I created some code which would display my data, with each second of time representing 3 years of simplified data. Over an 11-second sequence, the changing lights display 40 years of trends, showing the evolving popularity of vinyl, cassette, CD and digital music purchases. This was also accompanied by a festival lanyard-style pamphlet which explained the colour key for the data, as well as illustrating a further data set on recent digital streaming platform trends.