Sing It Along the World by Leah Xinyan Jin

A visualization of national anthems in the world.
Nowadays, a massive amount of data about the economy, education, environment, history, etc. were put together to recognize a country. A national anthem is a different and unique feature.
It is a medium that the country endeavors to define itself and to spread it out and loud. It shows not only the country’s identity, history, ideology, but also the prospect the country is desired to achieve in the future. It is a manifesto.

From left to right, top to bottom, each square represents the anthem of one country alphabetically, with a total of 190 countries included.
Three variables (sound waves and lengths of anthems, the most used works in lyrics) are taken into this visualization.

The black and white backgrounds of squares represent sound waves of national anthems. The curves are responding to the pitch and frequency levels of the songs; where the lines between black and white go faded and blurred means where the audio fades gradually; where lines go sharp and clean means where the audio has a sudden change in pitch or frequency.

Sizes of circles represent lengths of songs; colors of circles represent categories in which most used words such as “freedom”, “people”, etc. It is interesting to see the difference in repetitive words in every country’s anthem. The most used kind of words in 190 total nations are pronouns.