Which songs are most suitable for a dancing party?
📖 Background
It's that vibrant time of year again - Summer has arrived (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere at least)! There's an energy in the air that inspires us to get up and move. In sync with this exuberance, your company has decided to host a dance party to celebrate. And you, with your unique blend of creativity and analytical expertise, have been entrusted with the crucial task of curating a dance-themed playlist that will set the perfect mood for this electrifying night. The question then arises - How can you identify the songs that would make the attendees dance their hearts out? This is where your coding skills come into play.
💾 The Data
You have assembled information on more than 125
genres of Spotify music tracks in a file called spotify.csv
, with each genre containing approximately 1000
tracks. All tracks, from all time, have been taken into account without any time period limitations. However, the data collection was concluded in October 2022
.
Each row represents a track that has some audio features associated with it.
Column | Description |
---|---|
track_id | The Spotify ID number of the track. |
artists | Names of the artists who performed the track, separated by a ; if there's more than one. |
album_name | The name of the album that includes the track. |
track_name | The name of the track. |
popularity | Numerical value ranges from 0 to 100 , with 100 being the highest popularity. This is calculated based on the number of times the track has been played recently, with more recent plays contributing more to the score. Duplicate tracks are scored independently. |
duration_ms | The length of the track, measured in milliseconds. |
explicit | Indicates whether the track contains explicit lyrics. true means it does, false means it does not or it's unknown. |
danceability | A score ranges between 0.0 and 1.0 that represents the track's suitability for dancing. This is calculated by algorithm and is determined by factors like tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and regularity. |
energy | A score ranges between 0.0 and 1.0 indicating the track's intensity and activity level. Energetic tracks tend to be fast, loud, and noisy. |
key | The key the track is in. Integers map to pitches using standard Pitch class notation. E.g.0 = C , 1 = C♯/D♭ , 2 = D , and so on. If no key was detected, the value is -1 . |
loudness | The overall loudness, measured in decibels (dB). |
mode | The modality of a track, represented as 1 for major and 0 for minor. |
speechiness | Measures the amount of spoken words in a track. A value close to 1.0 denotes speech-based content, while 0.33 to 0.66 indicates a mix of speech and music like rap. Values below 0.33 are usually music and non-speech tracks. |
acousticness | A confidence measure ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 , with 1.0 representing the highest confidence that the track is acoustic. |
instrumentalness | Instrumentalness estimates the likelihood of a track being instrumental. Non-lyrical sounds such as "ooh" and "aah" are considered instrumental, whereas rap or spoken word tracks are classified as "vocal". A value closer to 1.0 indicates a higher probability that the track lacks vocal content. |
liveness | A measure of the probability that the track was performed live. Scores above 0.8 indicate a high likelihood of the track being live. |
valence | A score from 0.0 to 1.0 representing the track's positiveness. High scores suggest a more positive or happier track. |
tempo | The track's estimated tempo, measured in beats per minute (BPM). |
time_signature | An estimate of the track's time signature (meter), which is a notational convention to specify how many beats are in each bar (or measure). The time signature ranges from 3 to 7 indicating time signatures of 3/4 , to 7/4 . |
track_genre | The genre of the track. |
Source (data has been modified)
spotify <- readr::read_csv('data/spotify.csv', show_col_types = FALSE)
spotify
💪 Challenge
Your task is to devise an analytically-backed, dance-themed playlist for the company's summer party. Your choices must be justified with a comprehensive report explaining your methodology and reasoning. Below are some suggestions on how you might want to start curating the playlist:
- Use descriptive statistics and data visualization techniques to explore the audio features and understand their relationships.
- Develop and apply a machine learning model that predicts a song's
danceability
. - Interpret the model outcomes and utilize your data-driven insights to curate your ultimate dance party playlist of the top 50 songs according to your model.
🧑⚖️ Judging criteria
CATEGORY | WEIGHTING | DETAILS |
---|---|---|
Recommendations | 35% |
|
Storytelling | 35% |
|
Visualizations | 20% |
|
Votes | 10% |
|
✅ Checklist before publishing into the competition
- Rename your workspace to make it descriptive of your work. N.B. you should leave the notebook name as notebook.ipynb.
- Remove redundant cells like the judging criteria, so the workbook is focused on your story.
- Make sure the workbook reads well and explains how you found your insights.
- Try to include an executive summary of your recommendations at the beginning.
- Check that all the cells run without error.
⌛️ Time is ticking. Good luck!
spotify_distinct <- spotify %>% distinct()
nrow(spotify_distinct)
library(tidyverse)
spotify_new <- spotify %>%
select(-track_genre) %>%
distinct() %>%
filter(explicit == FALSE) %>%
mutate(score = sqrt(popularity * danceability))
spotify_new %>%
arrange(-score)
# DJ set needs to optimise for these things, perhaps through minimisation function:
## Harmonic mixing of subsequent tracks
## Tempo matching of subsequent tracks, with perhaps increasing tempo
## Maybe genre matching
# Tracks should also be danceable, popular, not explicit
# Need to filter out repeat tracks
# Two steps: 1) Track selection, for high popularity and danceability; 2) Ordering, to minimise tempo and harmonic changes
spotify[1912,]
head(spotify_distinct)
spotify_genre <- spotify_distinct %>%
select(track_id, track_genre) %>%
mutate(flag = 1) %>%
pivot_wider(names_from = track_genre, values_from = flag, values_fill = 0)
spotify_genre[1:10,1:10]
# Calculate mean genre distance for each song
distances <- dist(spotify_genre[,2:ncol(spotify_genre)])
dist_matrix <- as.matrix(distances)
average_distances <- apply(dist_matrix, 1, function(row) mean(row))
observation_names <- rownames(dist_matrix)
result <- data.frame(Observation = observation_names, AverageDistance = average_distances)