Ohio is a Piano
OK, I think I think we have a winner for coolest map-thing-of-the-year. Andy Woodruff at Cartogrammar has created a musical map:
Last month, as I was driving through Ohio to collect my final three counties in the state, it dawned on me: There are 88 counties in this state. There are 88 keys on a piano. I don’t know anything about music, but holy crap, I have to make a map based on this coincidence.
And so I did, bit by bit, gradually descending into madness in the process. It has no purpose, really, apart from being an experiment in some sort of weird artistic musical cartography. Ohio is a piano. Check it out. (It’s in Flash.)
Each county on the map is keyed to a piano note. Play the OhioPiano by plucking a county, or pull together a string of notes by charting a route between two cities. Change the note of each county by ranking them, highest to lowest, by a demographic (such as population, ethnic groups, number of farms, etc.). Arrange them just right to play a tune, or use one of the pre-programmed songs.
Woodruff says he's "gone off the deep end, musically and cartographically", but I say "Go Andy" you are now my carto-hero of 2009!
#440
posted by Cartophiliac @ Thursday, July 30, 2009
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Coolest map-thing-of-the-year, indeed!
Wow, thanks for all the kind words! It's cool if I put carto-hero 2009 on my resume, right?
By the way, it's great to see another map nerd out of the Dayton vicinity. I'm a native myself. (That being where I was headed while devising this carto-scheme.)
You can even use me as a reference.
I guessed you might have an Ohio connection, else why would this New Englander have all the Ohio counties?
The mind reels.
I tried this out. I could not go from anywhere in Ashtabula County to anywhere else on the "plan a route" part. Maybe this means something. Only major cities are identified so you can't go from some podunk town to podunk town, but it was still fun.
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