WHO WE ARE

Students of the Intro to Digital Humanities Course at West Chester University of Pennsylvania

By: Jordan Flynn, Samantha Stone, Taylor Bramante, Phillip Mahida, Cheyenne Taylor.

Project under review:

“The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs”

By: Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels

What we are going to do:

We will be evaluating how this project demonstrates the core values of digital humanities. We will not be doing this only by what Daniels and Thompson accomplished in their project, but how they got their information as well.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

First, Daniels and Thompson begin by measuring the similarity of music in different time periods dating back to 1979.

Then, Daniels and Thompson decide to reduce a song to 8 data points to evaluate. ‘acousticness’, danceability, energy, ‘instrumentalness’, liveness, loudness, ‘speechiness’, and valence.

Before last, they cite a coined term by John Seabrook known as “Track-and-hook” song writing. It’s a “music-making method that fundamentally distinguishes today’s music-making from all that came before”. It basically states that music making today is much more “factory work” than a creative blend of different sounds and lyric proportions. For example, digital production specialists are assigned to separate tracks, like factory workers in a car making facility. One tends for the snare track, another for a base track, and so forth.

Lastly, they talk about how two dominant producers have made hit songs throughout the years. Max Martin, and Luke Gottwald (a.k.a Dr. Luke).