Today’s post is an interview with Matthias Dittrich, creator of Narratives 2.0.

Narrative 2.0 visualizes music. The music was segmented into single canals. The canals are shown fan-like and the lines move from the center out with the time. The angle of the line changes according to the volume. The canals also move to orange as the volume increases.

First off, could you tell me a little about yourself?

I am studying Interface Design at the University of Applied Science in Potsdam. This is a course of studies which deals with themes like physical computing, usability, information visualization, screen based applications and so on. I’ve been there three years, and it is still very interesting. To earn some money, I work in a small web agency, where we design and develop websites.

How did you get interested in data visualizations?

This is a hard question. So in general, I would say everybody who starts programming starts with visualizations. If you try out some loops and mix it with conditions, voilà you made a visualization. OK, it is a simple way of thinking, but it is a beginning. When I started studying, I took two courses from Boris Müller. One was a course about processing (a simple java editor) and the other one was a general interface course which included visualizations. I think these two courses pushed me to make visualizations.

Narratives 2 is quite striking and very visually interesting. What was your original purpose in putting it together?

So as I told in the last question, I took courses from Boris Müller. One exercise was to visualize sounds or music. This was the point where I started creating the first “Narrative” visualization. The purpose was to create a unique image of a piece of music. The visualization should not exactly show the notes or the volume, it was more about getting a feeling of the music. For example, is it a calm piece of music, very regular or is it more loud and powerful? The principle was quite the same as in the “Narratives 2.0”, but the look was a little bit coarse and you can’t get a real feeling. So during the holidays, I started to rework the visualization and create “Narratives 2.0”.

What insight did you get through the work of this project?

The real valuable insight for me was to recognize programming as a simple tool, similar to a brush, pencil or Adobe Illustrator. Until this point, programming was one world and the other design tools were another. The other surprise was the very good feedback I received. I didn’t expect this.

If you were doing the project over what would you do differently?

The biggest problem of the applet is that it is not so dynamic. You need to link the mp3s in the code. Then you have to play a little bit with the values to get a nice visualization. The other point is that you do not get get good quality images out of the applet. So I would like to make it more interactive so that everybody could put his music in and get a visualization.

What really worked well that you would do again?

Creating this applet was very playful. I had just a vague direction. As a result, I could choose the data I use, and I was free to do what I want. This was a luxury I miss sometimes. Because of this luxury, I could try different things, and I could take the time I needed. To come back to your question, I would say in every project you should take some time to play with your options, because most times you come to a higher level then your first ideas.

Do you have any current visualization projects on which you are working?

Currently I don’t, but I hope this will change. My last visualization was “5 Years Designerlist” a project about the mail server at our university. It is not so artistically impressive, just because my intention was a more readable visualization, so I used the arc-method to visualize the data. Maybe more interesting is “nerdscape” a “3D landscape” of interaction projects in Germany. The problem here is that the visualization should use data of the platform “nerdmade”, which is still in development. As a result, the data is generated and not real.

What can we expect from you in the future?

Actually, I work with a team on a project named “nerdmade”. Sorry, no visualization, but a platform for young interaction design student to show their projects and get connected to other students. We hope that this will stimulate the interaction design scene in Germany to make still better projects (and still better visualization). The other point I like on these platforms is that we will have a big pool of data and a lot of possibilities to visualize.

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