1. In the past sixty years, we have had only two major changes in musicIn summary:
By using an algorithm called clustering, we can find similarities/clusters of artistes and their music using their song features.
Using this approach, we have two clusters of artistes — The String Lovers and The Poetics. The reason we chose these weird names lies in the two song features that define these clusters best: Instrumentalness and Speechiness.
Instrumentalness predicts whether a track contains no vocals on a scale of 0 to 1. “Ooh” and “aah” sounds are treated as instrumentals as well. The closer the value is to 1, the more likely there is no vocal content (e.g. a soundtrack) and the closer it is to zero, the more vocal it is (e.g. rap or spoken word).
Speechiness detects the presence of spoken words in a track.The other interesting thing about these clusters is when they appear on the Billboards Hot 100.
- The String Lovers score high on Instrumentalness but low Speechiness. This means that artistes in this period tend to favor instruments as opposed to speech.
- The Poetics are the direct opposite. They score pretty high in Speechiness but very low on Instrumentalness.
- Most String Lovers appeared on Billboard before the 1990s.
- Most Poetics appeared on Billboard after the 1990s.
- The 90s itself seemed to be a pivotal time in music as we see with the ~50–50 split between String Lovers and Poetics. This meant that artistes were split between going with this new type of music or sticking to the existing sound.
- The 90s was an extremely important time in music.
- The decline of rock bands and the rise of Hip-Hop played a major role in steering music to where it is today.
- Love is a popular theme across songs for the past six decades but the approach to love might differ across the different eras of music.
- Yes, modern artistes may be louder but it’s BECAUSE we have content :).
- Bonus Point: Michael Jackson, despite being most popular in the 80s, is a Poetic! He was ahead of his time!
