The mewithoutYou “Farewell” Tour [visualized] by Jared Whalen

After more than 20 years of writing and performing genre-defining music, the post-hardcore band mewithoutYou retired in the summer of 2022. The band was known for playing impressively diverse setlists, rarely repeating the same collection of songs twice and including material across their entire discography. To visualize this, I produced a data visualization to track the band's song selections each night of their final tour. The app updated daily, adding a new entry of data after each show.

The data was compiled with a series of Node.js scripts that pulled from the Setlist.fm and Spotify APIs. The wrangled data was then presented in an interactive data visualization built in Svelte.js. The end result is a heatmap showing what songs from what albums were played each show, as well as visualizing overall frequency and relative setlist position. Users can interact with the visual to hear a preview of the song and reveal more information about the concert.

Aesthetically, I wanted to keep to the theme and have the visuals resemble the timeline of audio recording software such as GarageBand or Pro Tools. The colored cells of the heatmap, as well as the negative space created by empty rows, accomplished this. The color choice was influenced by the art released on the tour poster.

Overall, this project was a fun way to geek out over one of my favorite bands and give other fans a new way to interact with the music they love. Since sharing with the band's fan community, I've had other tech-savvy fans clone the repo and recreate the project with their own favorite musical artists.
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Jared Whalen is a data visualization designer and journalist based out of Philadelphia. He is currently at Axios and formerly worked for The Delaware News Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.