I’m delighted that my article “A Matter of Perspective: Taking a Distant View of Music History” has just been published in the National Early Music Association Newsletter. The article sets out the case for using statistical techniques to study music history, with particular reference to early music, and specifically the Boalch Mould Online dataset of early keyboard instruments. You can read the article here.
Update (21 January 2025): The paper also got a mention on the BMO Blog.
I was recently asked whether I had any data to support the claim that the number of mentions of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) in hip hop lyrics has fallen off in recent years, after peaking in the mid-1990s. The LAPD attracted a lot of angry attention from hip hop artists in the wake of the 1992 LA riots, triggered when four LAPD officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King.
On the face of it, this claim should be easy to check: use a lyrics database to search for hip hop songs mentioning “LAPD”, find when they were released, and look at the trend. In practice, it turns out to be rather more complicated.
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I have recently exchanged a couple of emails with Jakob Hausladen, who has written a fascinating and enjoyable article on lute music, as part of a course on the philosophy of data science. The article draws on some of the techniques discussed on this site (including composers’ dates and nationalities, text analysis, publication network analysis), and also includes a section looking at a comparison of composers’ styles based on MIDI data. The article explains things well (including the risks and caveats), and makes excellent use of interactive graphics and sounds.
Like any good research, it raises lots of interesting questions for further investigation (some of which I have added to my list!)
I would recommend it for anybody interested in the use of statistics / data science to study music history. Or in lute music!
Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending was first performed, in a version for violin and piano, at Shirehampton Public Hall on 15th December 1920. This page gives details of that concert, based on the original programme, which is held in the Philip Napier Miles Archive in Bristol University Library.
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Congratulations to Sweden’s Loreen for her victory in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest! And to Liverpool for being the best of host cities. And thanks too to the Eurovision statisticians on posting the (almost) complete voting data for Liverpool 2023 on their website within 24 hours of the result!
This post looks at the detailed voting results. It refers back to previous analysis, particularly in this article.
Continue reading →Transcript of a presentation given at the RSS Merseyside Group’s event “A Stat for Europe: Statistics of the Eurovision Song Contest” at the University of Liverpool on 26 April 2023. It is partly based on my article in Significance (April 2023).
A video of the live version of this presentation is available here.
I’ve called this talk “The Joys of Eurovision Scoring” partly because I’m a bit of a nerd and Eurovision is an excellent source of statistics, but also because it is a clever scoring system, where everyone can have their say but there is guaranteed suspense and excitement up until the end of the show. It also reflects the Eurovision countries and how they relate to each other.
I’d like to cover three topics – what we can learn from the scores of individual jury members; why the public televote has more influence than the jury scores; and finally looking at the question of voting clusters.
Continue reading →I’m delighted to have an article “Eurovision Voting: a game of two halves” published in this month’s (April 2023) edition of Significance magazine.
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Concert-Diary has been advertising classical concerts since 2000, mainly in the UK, and (unlike some listings websites) allows you to go back and look at historic data. Concerts can be classified under several headings – one of which is “Christmas”, so I thought it would be interesting to look at this century’s Christmas concerts.
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The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a powerful tool for analysing historical text data. It uses the enormous corpus of books scanned by Google to analyse the frequency of words and phrases over time. An n-grams is just a combination of words – so a single word is a 1-gram, a pair of words a 2-gram, etc. The Google viewer has data up to 5-grams.
This has potential uses in many fields – including musicology. Here we will use the ngram viewer to analyse the rise and fall of ragtime music.
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My article on Desert Island Discs from April 2020 has been, by some margin, the most popular page on this site, in terms of number of visitors. Last year, I was approached by some researchers from the Alan Turing Institute about sharing the data with them so that they could do their own analysis. I was delighted to see this Turing Data Story appear on their website in March this year – they have updated my dataset, added further information from Wikipedia and Spotify, and looked at some different questions. Excellent stuff!
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