Team Members: Hannah Bish and Steven Stetzler
Instructions
This tool allows you to explore musical data from The Sounds of Spotify, which maintains playlists of current music from countries and cities around the world. Each axis represents a core musical attribute calculated by The Echo Nest, a data platform created for music analysis and used by Spotify for music curation and recommendation.
Select a country from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page to highlight that country in red in the parallel coordinates chart (top). Mouse over other lines in the top chart to highlight other countries in blue and compare their relative scores across attributes. This chart displays the average attribute value among a set of ~100 songs from each country.
The distibution of attribute values among all songs in the selected country's playlist is shown below each axis as a histogram. Click and drag over any histogram to see where the selected songs fall within the distribution for other attributes. For example, try to see how different levels of danceability correlate with energy levels by clicking and dragging over a region in the danceability histogram.
Visualization
Data Description
Attribute values represent a deviation within the dataset: 0 means this country had the lowest value in the data set, and 1 means that country had the highest value in the dataset. For example, Indonesia has a score of 1 in acousticness, so it has the most acoustic music among all countries. More details can be found in Spotify's documentation. As stated in the documentation, the attributes are:
- Acousticness: Whether or not a track is acoustic.
- Danceability: Describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity.
- Energy: Represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale.
- Instrumentalness: Predicts whether a track contains no vocals. "Ooh" and "aah" sounds are treated as instrumental in this context. Rap or spoken word tracks are clearly "vocal".
- Liveness: Detects the presence of an audience in the recording.
- Speechiness: Detects the presence of spoken words in a track. The more exclusively speech-like the recording (e.g. talk show, audio book, poetry), the higher the speechiness.