Andy Woodruff is a cartographer and developer who has been helping me out immensely with some shapefile functionality I’ve been struggling with for a long time (hope he’s not tired of me yet!).
I just checked in on his site, and his latest post is great. He noticed that Ohio has 88 counties, and there are 88 keys on a piano. So why not map county data musically?
Users can define what data to use to sort the counties into notes. So if you sort by population, for example, Franklin County (Columbus) and Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) are very high notes. You can then use your new state/keyboard to play you a song (Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is an option).
Not the most practically useful map (as Andy would readily admit, I’m sure), but pretty brilliant.
Michael Corey is a news applications developer at the