Teardrops on my GitR: Visualizing musicality in Taylor Swift’s discography

STA/ISS 313 - Spring 2024 - Project 1

Team Tear

Background

The Taylor R package contains three datasets:

  • taylor_album_songs - 29 variables with 194 observations

  • taylor_all_songs - 29 variables with 274 observations

  • taylor_albums - 5 variables with 14 observations

As avid Taylor Swift listeners, we knew that her extensive song catalog would provide a robust dataset to analyze. We were excited about the opportunity to quantify the relationships between her music’s features and their impacts!

Question 1: “Is there a relationship between an album’s average energy level and its critical reception?”

Metacritic and Energy Scores of Taylor’s Albums

The plot is titled Metacritic and Energy Scores of taylor swift albums. It is a combination of two plots. The top plot is a line plot showing critic scores of taylor swift albums by release date over time from 2006 to 2023. The overall trend is an increase in critical scores over time with a sharp increase beginning in 2017. The bottom plot has a box plot representing the distribution of song energy scores of each album on its release date. The box plots and line plot are shown on the same time scale so that we can observe that while critical reception of Taylor Swift albums have gone up, energy scores have gone down.

Figure 1: Since 2017, mean album energy scores have moved in opposite directions of critical scores.

Professional vs. Public Critical Reception

The plot is titled Less energetic albums have better critical reception. It is a scatterplot with two facets. One shows mean metacritic scores vs average energy score for each taylor swift album. The second plot shows user scores vs average energy scores for each album. The metacritic scores plot shows a clear negative correlation between mean energy scorea and critic score. The user scores plot shows that there is not a correlation between user scores and energy scores. This plot shows that there is more variability in the preferences of the general public for energetic vs less energetic music than there is among professional critics.

Figure 2: There is a negative correlation between mean energy score and metacritic score and an absent correlation between energy scores and user scores.

Question 2: “How do bonus tracks differ from album tracks?”

Danceability of bonus and album tracks

The plot is titled Danceability of Bonus vs. Album Tracks. It is a violin plot with five facets- one for each Taylor Swift album with bonus tracks. Each facet shows the danceability distribution of bonus tracks and album track, and distributions are significantly different between the two types.

Figure 3: The danceability of bonus tracks is not representative of the entire album.

Loudness over time of bonus and album tracks

The plot is titled Over time, both bonus and album tracks become quieter. It is a scatter plot which plots time on the x-axis and the corresponding loudness metric on the y-axis. The points in the scatterplot are colored to show the difference between album and bonus tracks. released songs. This graph shows that as time progresses, Taylor Swift songs become quieter, whether or not they are a bonus track.

Figure 4: Over time, both bonus and album tracks become quieter

Thank you!