Taylor Swift's Eras as Color Ribbons by Danielle Carrick

Taylor Swift shifts her sound with each album, creating new "eras" in her discography. From her twangy country origins in Taylor Swift to the indie-infused narratives of folklore and evermore, Swift has continuously reinvented her sound.

Sonically, we recognize these distinct eras in her discography…but can we quantify them? Visualize them? What is it about each album that contributes to its unique sound?

I used four musical measures provided for each song by Spotify including Energy, Danceability, Acousticness and Loudness.
To visualize a song, I converted these measures to RGBA space. Assigning a measure to each of these channels gives me a color swatch for each song. By combining all the songs in an album into a ribbon we can see the sonic DNA within and across albums.