Music in Data
Rainer
Vietnam War and the influence of culture on Music
Music and culture go hand in hand. Music ties together communities, influences traditions, and shapes our societies. However, music can also be a powerful tool for voicing our emotions and frustrations. In the U.S during the Vietnam War, music played a key role in influencing people’s opinions and politics. Dozens of artists raised their voices in protest to the needless killing in a senseless war. They used their platform to raise awareness and put pressure on their government. Although we cannot say in quantitative terms how much their songs influenced the decisions of the government, the power of music to unite people in protest was undeniable. As the general influences of music on culture are difficult to track in data, we chose to focus on the Vietnam War for which there is a wealth of documentation available. Here we track the success of anti-war musicians and their anti-war songs on the Billboard Top 100 charts.
Gabriel
Record labels
Music is released to the public mainly by one of the following: either an independent artist or a record label. Independent artists promote and distribute their music themselves, most of them by using services for such. On the other hand, record labels have a whole team designed for maximum efficiency in order to release a lot of quality tracks. Although these two options for releasing music have the same goal in mind, one of them is the obvious professional winner: the record labels. All of the biggest albums released ever had a team working on them, but how much does it cost per year for a record label to keep releasing new and near perfect tracks? How much money does this certain record label make after those investments? What are the biggest unit-selling albums of the 21st century? Let’s have a look:
Tim
Origin of instruments
Many instruments have roots in other instruments which can trace back to generations as far as 3000 years BC. Some of these "roots" and influences might be stronger on some instruments, whereas other instruments were developed because of technology. In order to better understand the lineage of certain instruments and the popularity of certain instrument types over the centuries, I have tried to visualise the lineage and origin of a few instruments from 4 different instrument classes. Looking at this visualisations you can find some interesting patterns like how most electric instruments were created in America and how most of the earlier instruments seemed to have been woodwind instruments
Many instruments have roots in other instruments which can trace back to generations as far as 3000 years BC. Some of these "roots" and influences might be stronger on some instruments, whereas other instruments were developed because of technology. In order to better understand the lineage of certain instruments and the popularity of certain instrument types over the centuries, I have tried to visualise the lineage and origin of a few instruments from 4 different instrument classes. Looking at this visualisations you can find some interesting patterns like how most electric instruments were created in America and how most of the earlier instruments seemed to have been woodwind instruments
Lineage in the Stars
Visualisation of the lineage of several western originated instruments using a circular type of dendrite graph. You can expand the tree by clicking on the white sphere in the middle or one of the stars. To look around and zoom in and out, simply drag your mouse over the edge of the corner and use your mouse wheel. Made using Unity with the WebGL framework
Visualisation of the lineage of several western originated instruments using the same data as the previous visualisation. You can sort the data by instrument type and approximate century of origin
Ilse
Evolution of Classical and Popular music
The first visualization concerns the different instrumentation per classic composer. The composer, lifetime, instrumentation, and average genre are represented.
Despite classical composers often being sorted into the same category, ‘classic’, the instrumentation and genre actually differed between each composer. Thus, this representation of some well-known classical composers shows the difference between them, based on a large part of each of their repertoires.
The second visualization shows how between 1958 and 2019 the ‘speechiness’, ‘acousticness’ and ‘instrumentalness’ have changed. The songs used for this data are songs that occurred in the Billboard Weekly Top 100.
Over time, music has changed. Not only in 500 years, but also within 60 years. This visualization shows how the ‘speechiness’ of songs is steadily increasing, for example. This trend is in accordance with the rise of pop music, for example.
The third visualization represents the average position of songs of each genre on the Weekly 100 Charts. This is visualized per genre in a box plot.
This visualization shows how popular, on average, each genre has been on the Weekly 100 Charts between 1958 and 2019, and how much the popularity tended to range.
The last visualization shows the occurrence and energy per genre per week between 1958 and 2019. The name of the song and the artist are also mentioned.
It is interesting to witness how the energy per genre differs, and how it changes within a genre over time. The occurrence of each genre makes for a different debate by itself. Some genres have come into existence, some fade in and out again, and some have almost disappeared entirely.
Luukas
Loudness war and Track length
During the last 50 years music has changed a lot. New innovations brought constant flux to the industry. One of the more well known phenomena concerning the change in music production is the "loudness war". It refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music to make the music stand out more (often at the detriment of audio fidelity and listener enjoyment). Producers would constantly try to one-up each other, making songs louder and louder. Another well known phenomenon is the shifting track length of popular music.
Music is strongly tied to the technology and economics behind it. Both in the way it is consumed and in the way it is created. The following graphs visualize how shifts in the music industry (popularisation of the CD, the shift to streaming) influence the aforementioned qualities of popular music.
(Hovering over a year on the left graphs shows a more detailed overview on the right for that year).