Music

Math and music go together like Billy Joel and his Piano, Prince and his high heels, or Morrissey and his soul crushing sadness. The connections are many and varied. There are practical and obvious ways math is used in recording music, counting music, and tuning an instrument. There are also very complicated interactions with how sound waves and acoustics work in different types of buildings and space. But there is also a less literal way we can use math to understand music.

Thanks to Spotify*, we can actually look at some harder to quantify attributes of music. We can look not just how fast songs are, but how sad, or energetic, how danceable a song is. We can see how artists change. How the music industry changes. How we change as we listen to different music.

Also thanks to Genius Lyrics and tools developed for natural language processing, we can get an idea of how the dialogue happening on stages across the world is changing.

Maybe through analyzing an important aspect of our culture we can overturn some of our biases and be better people. Also, we can geek out over some of our favorite bands.

*I am in no way associated with Spotify. I love them, I a customer, a fan and proponent, but not in any official capacity. I am working on a personal app to displace artist information. I say all this because I don't want to get get in any copyright situation, want to create some good karma, and love seeing what my friends are listening to on Spotify (Nicole's having a very Drake day today).