Week 2: Topics in Music Lyrics Over Time

If you have issues accessing the interactive visualization through Tableau, feel free to look at the non-interactive version here. 

This data visualization was created through Tableau with the Music Dataset : 1950 to 2019 (link) that I found on an open-source data set library called Kaggle. The dataset reflects musical releases across multiple genres and countries of origin. 

This line graphs visualization captures the trend of topics in music lyrics from 1950 to 2019. Topics are listed in the Legend, and include: Feelings, Love/Romance, Night/Time, Obscenity, Sadness, Violence, World/Life. These topics reflect how each song was categorized based on a language analysis of the lyrics, included in the original dataset. Each line is colored using the Color Blind option on Tableau, making the visualization accessible even to those with visual impairments. The visualization is also interactive, with each line being clickable and showing how many counts of the topic were there at any given year in range. 

One notable insight that this visualization helps us observe is the astounding increase of both Obscenity and Violence reflected in the lyrics of music starting from the 2010s. While the reason behind this may not be clear, one may predict that changing trends in music lyric topics reflect both changes in the music industry, as well as the myriad of political, cultural and economic changes across societies. As such, this visualization is meaningful and unique in that it offers valuable commentary and insights about the bigger society through a seemingly small agent -- what people sing about.