Data analysts love music, don't they?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/lyrics-for-billboard-no-1-singles-have-average-reading-level-of-an-8yearold-10260029.html

Sorry 4 clickbait, but there are so many of these dumb kinds of articles right now. Don't data people have better things to do than try and work out how pop music works?

Does Glenn Mcdonald count as a data analyst?

This is a kinda interesting article that was in Wired last month.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/05/features/kobalt-how-data-saved-music/viewall

"studies" about music really only tend to solidify the biases of their researchers (and the writers breathlessly reporting on them). throw all of them in the trash.

the only music studies I trust are The Startrekman's

How is this surprising? It's like comparing fast food to fine dining. It is what it is, there for everyone to enjoy. Or not.

i don't mind a good data analysis but so many of these are so uninsightful and manage to do only what maura has pointed out. this reading level one might be the worst i've seen yet.

like...

http://dbcgmp5q1c16s.cloudfront.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/18081611/Popular-Music-Main-Image.jpg

ughhhhh

(amazingly there are ppl in the comments section of the blog where this is originally posted saying this could be an academic paper........... [fortunately some others pointing out how ridiculous/horrendous it is too but yeah])

the one that got press coverage recently that analyzed harmonic and timbral qualities of billboard hits going back to 1960 was actually pretty decent, altho i laughed really hard at the authors' assertion that "Those who wish to make claims about how and when popular music changed can no longer appeal to anecdote, connoisseurship and theory unadorned by data." like lololololol good luck w/ that buddy.

any good examples?

*examples of good data analysis on music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

lol Ozzy Osbourne in that pic what is this 2003

also they're just picking on Melanie Fiona damn

i once saw a chapter in some math book where they programmed an algorithm to complete an unfinished Beethoven symphony but have never been able to find it since

Like any data analysis / research, it's only as good as the researchers can make it. Reading levels is bullshit, but there are plenty of interesting ones out there. Always vaguely dubious of the one where people are brazenly trying to predict what will be popular next based on what was popular last, though. That goes for everything, though, not just music.

hi! data analyst here.

first, no, we don't have anything better to do. i mean, we do, but feeding taylor swift songs into a computer makes a nice break from analyzing effects on efficiency of ehr implementation.

second, this is crap data analysis, and it only makes it into newspapers because apparently people don't know how to look at charts. i mean, look at that chart of "genre intelligence comparison over the last 10 years". what does that tell you? all i see is a bunch of lines oscillating pseudorandomly between the values of 2 and 4. assume a margin of error of one grade level, which is pretty reasonable all things considered, and the obvious conclusion is that there has been no change at all in word complexity over the past ten years.

see also: that horrible chart that's been floating around linking bands people like to sat scores (which i suppose is more of an american thing). pseudo-scientific claptrap.

that's not even mentioning other questionable assumptions in the article, such as that louisville, a city where i lived for a decade and still visit regularly, is somehow a haven for country music. also, of course, the entire notion that artistic validity is determined by grade level is wholly undermined by "green eggs and ham".

Does the line shoot upwards during the time period that "O Superman" was in the top ten?

also, if he's that concerned about city names skewing his data, why didn't he just set his calculations to exclude proper nouns? i mean, seriously, who taught this guy how to analyze data, martin rimm?

Seems to me that a very general problem in data-analysis is that if you analyze data you don't know that much about, any results seem as reasonable as any other results.

would love to do a geir hongro inspired "# of chord changes per song" time series

i think there was a thing a short while ago like that.

yep http://matthiasmauch.de/_pdf/MauchEtAl_EvolutionPopUSA1960-2010.pdf

I am sympathetic to the idea of playing with data and seeing what falls out but I can confidently say that almost all studies purporting to rely on deep linguistic analysis of lyrics are going to be nonsense.

this is kinda cool http://j.mp/1LfobQG

also kinda 'thx for the email dad'

What drives me crazy about things like the Mauch study is that there is plenty of equally-sophisticated analytical work on popular music that is done by people who actually have expertise in the subject, that deals with much better questions than "whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated", none of which ever gets written up in The Guardian.