» Map-based music visualizations considered harmful Augenmusik

» Map-based music visualizations considered harmful Augenmusik: "The most important rule (which is true for all map-based representations): If you absolutely have to use this abstraction MAKE SURE THAT THE MAP DOES NOT CHANGE! Humans are very good at remembering spatial relationships (you could probably tell me without looking how all these things in your apartment are arranged. See also Roman Room memorization technique) and user interfaces that tap into this ability should also support it. Once the map changes all of these intricately learned relationships are useless. Point in case: Aweditorium. I remembered hearing interesting Danish experimental pop there (it was Oh No Ono by the way) which was somewhere in the upper right corner of the map. But of course, once I restarted the app the whole map got reshuffled and I couldn’t find it. Why have a map if the spatial relationships are meaningless anyway? I have similar gripes with the actually pretty great Kindle app for the iPad, that re-calculates the layout of the text – no, not only every time the font size is changed – but every time the app is restarted! Again, remembering that some interesting tidbit of text is on the lower part of a page isn’t any use."