OddityViz — a tribute to David Bowie with data

Data is more than numbers — it is information found all around us, in where we go, what we consume, touch, watch or hear.

The 10 records deconstruct Space Oddity, each illuminating a different aspect of the song but all using the same format: one rotation of the record represents the duration of the song.

It’s possible to extract information (data) from almost any experience. This project was a self-initiated journey to deconstruct an iconic piece of popular culture, exploring the application of data visualisation techniques to music — giving form to what we hear, imagine and feel while listening to a song.

What would Space Oddity look like through the lens of data visualisation? This is what I set out to explore in OddityViz — a collaborative project with talented data researcher and musicologist Miriam Quick. We extracted musical data from the song’s layered tracks and visualised it in a set of 10 engraved records, paired with large-scale prints and projections that draw from the song’s fragmented interstellar world. Through this journey we can appreciate more clearly the many layers of Bowie’s masterpiece and hopefully return to it with a deeper understanding.

A portrait of David Bowie composed of thousands of stars — image by Mike Brondbjerg

The seeds of this project were planted back in January 2016, after Bowie’s death.

The below scene is what I witnessed the day after he died:

Children dancing to David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’ in a campsite in the South Island of New Zealand

People of all ages were dancing and listening to Bowie’s music on repeat; he was one of those rare stars able to bring us together — transcending generations, places and time.

Like most fans, it was difficult to take in the news of his passing. Beyond the prolific catalogue of music, he provided a consistent and compelling influence on popular culture. Over the course of five decades his ever-changing personality helped challenge norms and redefine style itself.

David Bowie left us with a constellation of intersecting worlds, loaded with material for celebration, consideration and interpretation.

On the other hand, navigating the Bowie universe can be a daunting mission. His legacy spans more than 700 songs, 28 studio albums and several stage personas. Which makes navigating the Bowie universe a daunting mission.

It quickly became apparent that it was necessary to limit the scope and focus of this project to one song.

Space Oddity was the launching pad for David Bowie’s ascension to mainstream notoriety.

In arguably one of the most acclaimed tracks of a distinguished career, we are introduced to Major Tom — an astronaut, launched into space, who leaves his rocket and drifts into the void, never to return.

The song is rich in cultural connections and presents an appealing combination of songwriting, theatre, and storytelling — a wealth of visual inspiration to draw on from a very interesting period in popular culture.

Space Oddity was released in 1969; the same year man was set to land on the moon. It was in this context that a young (and stoned) David Bowie found the song’s inspiration in the rich, visual experience of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic achievement 2001 — A Space Odyssey.

Nearly 50 years later, I found myself thrilled about the idea of not only deconstructing the song’s elements, but creating a visual language that could communicate in a manner befitting this timeless age of visual culture.

The project took inspiration from a variety of references from popular culture, while the colour palette naturally recalls the darkness of space (black) and the stars (white). One can also see a reference to the Voyager Golden Records in the engraved dataviz format.

Rather than abstract soundscapes, the records become a visual system to understand how Bowie masterfully crafted Major Tom’s journey. Photo by Ben Hutton

Our intention was not to create an alternative visual score but to make the experience of listening to a song more ‘visible’.

By breaking down the song’s core components — instrumentation, rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics, structure — and piecing them back together, we can gain a deeper understanding of our initial experience.

Not only did we extract and analyse the data, but we always related it back to its function in the construction of Major Tom’s tale. From the start, we wanted to tell a story with the data that would be meaningful to people. What are we saying? What insight is this adding? How does this relate to a particular interpretation? And while we hope the data is ‘correct’ in the sense that we got all the chords right (and so on), in this case we weren’t trying to be objective. Instead, we wanted to be true to our own interpretation.

The data gathering — mostly done by Miriam — reflected this intention. The work was manual and time-consuming. Even where we did use tools we checked the results by ear and adjusted them until they matched with what we heard.

Post-analysis, we needed a system that would both allow comparison of the song’s dimensions and the communication of our interpretation.

The vinyl record offered the perfect medium. From Edison’s phonograph to today’s vinyl records, music has been encoded through a series of grooves that spiral to the centre of the circular disc.

Applying a similar logic, I wanted the musical data to be physically engraved on the LPs to resemble this traditional process. This forced me to work without colour, pushing the visual representation of data perhaps to less conventional forms.

The LP format determined the system we used to encode the data — one rotation of the record equals the full duration of the song, all five minutes and 17 seconds of it.

Time is shown on the x-axis and flows clockwise, beginning at 12 o’clock, while the y-axis displays each different dimension of data.

Given the constraints of the laser cutting and etching on the records, a minimal, bold design was imperative. Simple geometry and basic shapes were used to encode both sounds — evoking the nature of each individual instrument — and narrative patterns.

For example, Ground Control is represented by a square (a familiar, safe and angular shape that represents a point of stability on Earth) while Major Tom is a circle (a less mechanical, more human character, who becomes a one with the cosmos).

What did we visualise?

Starting with the most obvious element of the song — the narrative — we track Major Tom’s trajectory from Earth. The spiral follows him from lift off — past 100,000 miles — and into the depths of space. We know his status because he is reporting back to Ground Control.

In Narrative, the relative location of the two characters and their ability to communicate is embedded in the design of this record. Ground Control is stationed on Earth, next to the centre label, while Major Tom is on the spiral, moving further and further away. Lines emanating from the white (vocal) sections show the transmissions — the points where the two characters repeatedly call each other over the radio system: ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’, ‘This is Major Tom to Ground Control’.

The dialogue between the two characters is simple. We could be listening in on two children playing astronauts. The radio transmissions are short, informal and memorable (countdown, lift-off, tin can).

For Lyrics, branches represent the structural relationships between words, while symbols on the ends indicate word type. The base of each ‘tree’ covers the line duration, and its anchoring point denotes which of four categories of utterance the line falls into.

The song was written to be a duet. But, in the end, Bowie performed both characters and through melody he is interpreting each role. Ground Control’s low, almost monotone pitch is contrasted by high pitch and wide-ranging melodies for Major Tom.

Here, groups of lines show which pitches occur in each melodic phrase, with higher notes towards the middle of the record. Line thickness shows the number of times each pitch is repeated within the phrase. The thicker the line, the more the phrase is centred around that note. Line length represents phrase duration. The record also displays the waveform of the lead vocal track. Where Bowie sings as Ground Control, the waveform comes out from the middle of the record and where he sings as Major Tom, the waveform comes in from the outside.

Despite its simple lyrics and the repetitions to identify who speaks, the musical structure is complex: lyrics and melodies evolve with the story, without circling back over the same material.

This disc visualises the structure — showing repetition on the phrase and section level. Repeated phrases are linked by arcs and repeated sections are shown around the middle of the record. Solid lines link vocal phrases that are repeated exactly, while dotted lines link sections that are recognisably repetitions, but with a slight change the second or third time (modified repeats). We distinguish lyrical from musical or melodic repetition.

We chronicled the variety and layering of instrumentation, revealing a balancing act between traditional orchestral instruments (violins, violas, cellos, and flutes) and now-vintage synthesizers.

Each instrument is represented with a unique shape evocative of its sound: strings are waves, the acoustic guitar is a triangle and the bass is round.

Texture visualises which voices or instruments can be heard in each bar of the song. A symbol means there is vocals or instruments in that bar; no symbol means it’s silent. Three vocal parts tell the story of Space Oddity — a main vocal and two backing vocals — accompanied by seven instruments and a string section. The rhythm section — bass, drums and Bowie’s 12-string guitar — play in almost every bar and provide the song’s skeleton.

We can clearly see the role of the instruments by looking at the recording of each track. The countdown creates suspense, and the strings — silent until now — get louder and louder, building tension towards a crescendo.

This is the lift-off moment. Paul Buckmaster’s string section plays for the first time, then adds a kind of introspective spaciousness to Major Tom’s rather sad chorus (‘For here am I sitting in a tin can / Far above the world’) and to the guitar solo. It’s interesting to note that strings do not accompany the sections sung by Ground Control, a more (quite literally) down-to-earth character.

The Recording disc deconstructs Bowie’s Space Oddity into its eight original master tracks, which were released in 2009 as part of a special edition marking the song’s 40th anniversary.

The crescendo coincides with the moments listeners were more likely to report strong emotional response.

By recording how people felt while listening to the song, we were able to also notice that the emotional level didn’t seem to drop at the end. The uncertainty of Major Tom’s fate helps maintain emotional connection.

This record shows a set of emotional responses to the song from listeners. ‘Emotion’ is admittedly a strange metric. What is emotion? It could relate to many musical elements — dynamics, harmony, lyrics and so on — and the experience of it is unique to each person. We deliberately simplified the issue by treating emotion as a single variable, running from low to high.

In the outro, both bass and drums become chaotic, and sudden crashes and slides are painting the disintegration of the ‘tin can’ as Major Tom floats far above the moon.

This resolves in a never-ending loop — an eternity of stepping and re-stepping through the door.

The final disc of the series illustrates the central themes of the song: the destruction of its main character, the bittersweet nature of triumph, the smallness of humanity in a vast, extended universe.

This final record stands out from the rest due to its use of a distinct visual language: emoji. Rather than being driven by data, it utilises illustration and iconography that loosely represent text and incorporates visual metaphors from Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey — one of the main inspirations.

The disc is divided into two sections. The outer illustrative sequence of images illustrates Major Tom’s trip with an ever-changing circle. On the inner rotation of the record, the song’s lyrics are directly represented as a series of emojis, to be read from the middle of the record outwards.

Major Tom travels from a familiar place to an unknown landscape. Playing with the same visual language used across the other discs (Major Tom as a circle and Ground Control as a square), the departure point recalls a cityscape — a familiar, man-made grid — while the arrival point recalls a soundscape made of fluid lines, the unknown structure of the universe.

Our visual investigation was then brought to life with animation (below), in a freer attempt to link various aspects of the deconstruction to the actual music.

Collaborating with Mike Brondbjerg, a talented generative artist, we created a moving image including a portrait of the artist and a series of sequences (some which Mike coded in Processing and others that I animated in Adobe After Effects).

Through computational animations, large-scale posters, engraved discs and a window installation we have been able to experiment with how to best encode the narrative. It took months of exploration and many hours of listening to the song on repeat!

Thanks to the support of Wieden+Kennedy and producer Genevieve Sheppard, we were able to exhibit the project in London to mark the first anniversary of Bowie’s death.

Since then, OddityViz has been on the road, with mini installations and talks in London, Milan, Minneapolis and Tbilisi Georgia.

Wieden+Kennedy London, January 2017–OddityViz sculptural objects to sound reactive visuals. Photo by Ben Hutton

In my opinion, dataviz is more than a tool to render numbers, it’s a way to make sense of any experience and communicate the underpinning stories.

This piece of work sits at this intersection — processing, communicating and sensing data. Bowie’s alien language is visualised through a system that reveals patterns and insights. Similar to music, the system is not something universally understood. However, as you learn how to read it, the language becomes meaningful and legible.

I hope that the project will make the experience of listening to the song more ‘visible’ — giving form to the wonderful and rich world Bowie so beautifully constructed but also to what we feel and imagine while listening to the song.

More on each record can be found online at oddityviz.com — where both records and prints are available for purchase.

Valentina D’Efilippo is an award-winning information designer and co-author of The Infographic History of the World.

Based in London, she works with public organisations, start-ups, and global brands. Pursuing imaginative and compelling visual outcomes, often aimed to visualise data and distill complexity, her work takes many forms — from theatre productions and exhibitions, to editorial content and interactive platforms.

Her earlier project ‘The Shining — a visual deconstruction’ took a similarly detailed approach to visualising Kubrick’s film masterpiece The Shining.