A few weeks ago saw the final of the tenth series of The Voice UK – a reality TV singing competition. The first stage of The Voice consists of blind auditions, where contestants sing, unseen by the four coaches whose chairs face away from the stage. If a coach likes what they hear, they press a button to turn around. If more than one coach turns, the contestant chooses which team to join. The blind auditions finish when each coach has a team of ten. Subsequent rounds reduce the field until four remain for the final, with the winner chosen by public vote. This article looks at the blind audition rounds over the ten series.
Continue reading →Category: Visualisation
Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 5 – The Concert Season
This article in the series exploring the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset looks at when the concerts were held. This covers questions such as in which decade or year they took place, at what point during the year, on which days of the week, and at what times of day? And how did this vary according to the type of concert?
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 4 – Ticket Prices
In this article about the Eighteenth Century London Concerts dataset, I will look in more detail at the prices of concert tickets.
The published data has multiple prices and categories listed in single cells of the spreadsheet. This needs to be parsed before it can be used for statistical analysis.
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 3 – Concert Venues
The first article in this series looked at how to get the data on Eighteenth Century London Concerts into a more usable form, and the second geocoded the locations and classified the venues by type. In this third article, we will start the analysis of the data by looking in more detail at the distribution of concert venues.
Continue reading →Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 2 – The Locations
In the previous article looking at Simon McVeigh’s “Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800“, I considered how to organise the data to make it suitable for statistical analysis. In this second article, I will add to the dataset by identifying the exact locations of the concert venues.
Continue reading →British Music Plaques
Many British buildings are adorned with plaques, marking the birthplace or residence of a famous person, or the site of a significant event. Details of these plaques are available in an online database, and I thought it would be interesting to see how many of them have a musical connection.
Continue reading →The Teacher-Student Network
I recently stumbled across this page on Wikipedia, listing music students and their teachers. This is an ideal dataset to explore as a network diagram, or “graph”, in which a set of points (or “nodes”) are connected by lines (or “edges”). Here, the nodes are individuals, and there is an edge between them if one taught the other.
Continue reading →Christmas Singles
It’s the time of year when our thoughts inevitably turn to ways of producing a topical graph that looks like a Christmas tree.
Continue reading →Song Lyrics 3: Repetition and Compression
We all know that a good song depends on repetition – both of the tune and the lyrics. Too much repetition and it is just boring; too little, and it can lack structure. This article looks at different aspects of repetition in song lyrics.
Continue reading →Concert Programming at the New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic has got an excellent online archive of all of its concerts since 1842. This article uses the archive to investigate which composers tend to be programmed together.
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