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Introduction:
Introduction:
Welcome to our hypothetical digital humanities project, in which we will delve into the dataset "Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960-2010"! This dataset, compiled by Matthias Mauch, a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, contains valuable information such as artist names, song titles, and various musical metadata of the Billboard Hot 100 entries for every quarter over the fifty-year period. For some context, the Billboard Hot 100 serves as the industry standard for ranking songs and artists, taking into account album profit and song playtime. To provide context to our findings, we have incorporated seven research articles exploring gender and popular music. Our project takes a multi-faceted approach, focusing on themes, lyrics, genre, and gender representation in popular music.
Our Research Questions:
Our Research Questions:
How has the representation of gender changed in popular music on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1960 to 2010?
What are the dominant themes and lyrical content in popular music on the Billboard Hot 100 across different decades?
Are there any correlations between the social and cultural events of a specific era and the types of music that dominated the Billboard Hot 100 during that time?
Our primary objective is to explore the themes prevalent across different decades in popular music. To accomplish this, we will analyze the "decade" and "track_name" columns in the dataset. By obtaining the lyrics of each song from external sources, we will conduct text analysis to identify patterns, themes, and genres.
An essential aspect of our research involves mapping the gender of the creators for each song and investigating whether gender plays a role in popular music. This examination of gender representation will add a new dimension to our analysis. We will explore the lyrics of each song and employ topic modeling techniques to identify trends and themes specific to each decade.
In addition to analyzing themes and gender representation, we will also investigate the popularity of songs. By applying a gender filter, we aim to assess the influence of gender on the popularity of music. To facilitate this analysis, we plan to develop a visualization dashboard, potentially using Tableau, where we can showcase our findings and present them in an interactive and visually appealing manner.
The first thing we will be doing is to gather the most important data in our project, which is the lyrics data. Looking back at the dataset that we have, there are 17094 rows. It will be very time-consuming for us to manually search and put in the database. For convenience and speed, we have decided to use “lyrics genius API” to help us generate lyrics data for each song in our dataset.
After we gather our lyrics data, we can start to clean up our data and be ready for LDA topic modeling, and other text analysis. The steps we chose to clean our data are to make them all lowercase, remove stopwords, and punctuation, tokenize, and lemmatize.
In the next step, we will start exploring the theme of the lyrics, and its relationship with the decade. We did this by grouping each decade together, and in the end, we come up with five different decades in our dataset. The five different decades are 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000.
On the right, we have a word cloud, that outlined important words in the lyrics in 1960. A word cloud is typically used to visualize text or to depict keyword metadata on websites. Tags are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color. We see some important words such as tear, black, breakdown, and mercy. We can somewhat tell that the decade 1960 is probably a sad, and more emotional decade. Shifting to 1970 on the bottom right, we notice the theme started to change. The reason is we start to see words like “high”, “yearn”, “logical”, “love”, “kissed”, “alright”, and “ecology”. We notice there is definitely a theme change. It is going toward a more friendly direction, more energetic, and more friendly theme. As we are analyzing the theme of the lyrics, I also want to say what is the reason behind the change of theme.
Are there any particular events that really stand up across the decade? According to The People History Home, we have Soviet Untion – U2 Plane Shot Down, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and Boynton v. Virginia. We can see and conclude it was a very depressing decade with lots of events going on. The reason we did this project is also want to reveal the feeling, and meaning that lyrics want to bring out. Lyrics at all times play an important role that revealing the emotions of the singers and the decades that the singers are in.
We also created word clouds for 1980,1990, and 2000 (shown below). However, we do not actually want to perform our interpretation on the word clouds themself. We really want our readers to be able to think through what historical events happened related to the lyrics/theme of the songs. This will be an interactive session on our website where each user would be able to share their thoughts online and communicate with each other.
Continue from above each of the songs in a decade could only be plain texts and does not carry any thought. It only carries out feeling, and emotions, when the audience hears and interpret the lyrics. If this sounds familiar to you guys, this is what “Reader Response critics” talked about. It said, “They assert that texts have no life apart from readers”. I believe this can definitely apply to the concept of our project. Lyrics can just be like text and carry no feeling until an audience connects with them.
Moreover, everyone can look at the same word cloud for the lyrics, and come out with entirely different interpretations than each other. That’s totally possible as word certainly connects with the audiences’s consciousness. Each people carries a different experience and so do their lyrics and songs. That’s also a part of our projects - to find out lyrics, and their connections with personal experiences.
from left to right 1980,1990, and 2000
Timeline: Outline important events throughout 1950-2000
Timeline: Outline important events throughout 1950-2000
To answer the third question about how this connects with larger societal trends and events, we created a timeline of major social and cultural events alongside our stacked chart in order to provide historical context.
The 1960s was a period of significant social and political change, with events like the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of counterculture. In music, rock and roll continued to be popular. New genres like psychedelic rock also emerged. Many songs of this era had strong messages of peace and love, and protested against war and injustice.
The 1980s saw the rise of technology, including personal computers and the early Internet, and political events such as the end of the Cold War. This decade was dominated by synth-pop, new wave, and the advent of hip-hop. They reflected a society looking to the future.
In the 1990s, the rise of the Internet, economic prosperity, and significant global events took place. In music, grunge and alternative rock expressed a form of rebellion against mainstream culture, while hip-hop continued to grow and became popular.
In the early 2000s, the world experienced events like 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and major technological advances such as the rise of social media. The music of this era was defined by a diverse range of genres. Pop music and rock bands are all popular. Hip-hop continued its rise. The music reflected the themes of resilience, political unrest, and a changing digital society.
In the early 2010s, there was continued technological advancement with the widespread use of smartphones, social media, and streaming services. Events such as marriage equality, and the BLM movement shaped societal consciousness. In the music world, this era is characterized by pop music and the rise of electronic dance music (EDM). Hip-Hop continued to be a major force and country music saw a resurgence in popularity.
The charts visualize the evolution of gender representation in the Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1960 to 2010. On the x-axis, we have the years grouped by decades, and on the y-axis, we have the number of songs that made it into the Billboard Hot 100 each year, broken down by the gender of the artists. From these charts, it is evident that music by male artists has dominated the Billboard Hot 100 throughout the entire period from 1960 to 2010. This dominance is significant and consistent, and points to a possible bias towards male artists in the music industry, or perhaps to audience preferences. In the 1960s and 1970s, we see the presence of female artists gradually increasing. However, this growth does not continue into the 1980s and 1990s, as the number of hits by female artists in the chart decreases during these decades. Interestingly, music from groups consistently contributes a significant portion of the hits in each decade. This could suggest that the audience enjoys variety and diversity in their music.
From the 2000s onwards, there was a noticeable increase in songs by female artists in the charts, signifying a potential shift in the industry or audience preference towards a greater gender balance. In conclusion, the representation of gender in the Billboard Hot 100 charts has evolved over the years, but it's clear that male artists have dominated the charts. Despite these disparities, the trends suggest an increasing openness to diversity in popular music over time. Nevertheless, there is still much room for improvement to ensure equal gender representation in the music industry.
In conclusion, we were able to illustrate the complex ways that music reflects and influences societal changes by examining popular music through the lens of gender, theme, and historical context. These findings would show that music is important because they are cultural artifacts, ideologies, and narratives of different eras. We hope our project encourages more people to study how music history is full of interesting details and how it keeps changing along with society!
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