History of Popular Music
"History of Popular Music" is an interactive data visualization that explores the evolution of popular music between 1965 and 2010. Based on the Billboard Hot 100, it reveals how genres and emotional content in song lyrics have changed over the decades. The goal of the visualization is not only to highlight trends over time but also to allow users to discover individual songs and artists behind the data
This visualization sorts songs into stylistic categories such as Rock, Hip-Hop, Pop, or Jazz, and shows when these styles were especially popular. Click the legend to select individual genres. The genre classification is based on AI-driven audio analysis and may contain inaccuracies. The data comes from the study "The Evolution of Popular Music" by Mauch et al.
The lyrics of all songs were analyzed for their emotional impact using an emotional analysis. The AI evaluates the correlation with the given emotion, with a value between 0 (does not apply at all) and 1 (completely applies). The visualization shows the intensity of these five emotions over the entire period. The average value of each emotion was set as the threshold. The threshold can be adjusted as desired using the slider. This makes it easy to find out which songs most strongly evoke an emotion. Individual emotions can be shown or hidden by clicking on the legend.
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