tune-without-the-words:

A map of motifs in Hamilton, with the hopes that this will enhance your enjoyment of the soundtrack, and that I’m not killing to dissect here.

A little orientation for what you’re looking at: Every line represents a lyrical and/or melodic theme. They originate from the song where they’re most prominent (for example, the blue lines signifying “Wait for It” come from “Wait for It” even though the chord progression occurs twice before then, because “Wait for It” is obviously the best-developed example of that theme) or, if there isn’t really a most prominent song, the one they appear in first (which is why the purple “bastard, orphan” lines are coming from “Alexander Hamilton”). The legend for the colors is on the left. I was going to make it in order of appearance, but then I messed it up, and I was writing in permanent ink, so…

 I left out songs that didn’t connect to the rest of the musical (”Farmer Refuted” and King George’s beautiful triptych) to avoid clutter (cue bitter laughter). For the same reason, I left out motifs that were peoples’ names (”Alexander Hamilton” in the signature rhythm, “Aaron Burr, sir”, “Eliiiiiiiza”, “Angelicaaa”) because it would have cluttered the diagram too much. I only assigned colors to motifs that occurred in three or more songs. For example, the line “here comes the general!” happens in both “Right-Hand Man” and “Meet Me Inside”–but after that it doesn’t come back. So, no color for that one.  

If you find more connections, let me know! Also, if anyone else has better ideas for how to visualize this, also let me know! I appreciate talking about the minutiae of visually representing complex datasets, because I am a huge geek (in case the massive chart about the internal structure of a Broadway musical didn’t tip you off).