I was asked to create a piece of work for a London art show with the theme of ‘London Lyrics’. It got me thinking about how prevalent London may be in modern music, so I had a hunt around and found this Wikipedia page listing all songs titled after London, or a location or feature of the city. (You’ve got to love Wikipedia..!)

After scraping the data from the wiki page and getting it into a usable text format, I wrote a Processing sketch to map out the resulting data. The mapping method is essentially a graph of the letter distribution of each title contained in the list. Letters are distributed a > z, left > right, whilst that letter’s position in it’s parent word is distributed bottom > top. A simple rectangle is placed at the point of each letter, it’s size defined by the size of it’s parent word.

The final illustration is intentionally heavily abstracted from it’s original data set, but strangely forms a complex a mix of waveforms and skyscraper-like structures. I produced a limited run of 10 prints, all are now sold.

Close-ups :