Artist Statement:
BPM theory is a program designed to examine the relationship of tempo patterns in popular music over the past 8 decades. As the user hovers their mouse over the bar representing a specific decade, one can watch the visualization of the bar grow and shrink at the speed most popular for music of that time.
The animated array of bars creates a visualization not unlike a spectrum analyzer which measures the amplitude of a range of different frequencies in sound and shows designated bars on a graph to exhibit the active frequencies of the audio. We chose to display the data in such a format that was relevant to the context of music but also allowed the viewer to interpret the data in an unbiased way.
Research regarding colour and musical key association carried out by Ian C. Firth was obtained online through the website http://www.musicandcolour.net and provided the framework for the colouring of each decade’s animated bar. The corresponding colour for each, most popular musical key was represented on the decades designated bar.
After applying these characteristics to each decade we found there was a pattern emerging within our experiment. The average tempo for top charting hit music within recent times in the past half century has all been within a 10bpm range all around about 115bpm. So even though styles of music have come and gone, there is a generally accepted speed for music which seeks to gain the greatest mass appeal that stands the test of time.
Concept
We began by parsing data from “Dave Tompkins Music Database” a website found online which contained data on tempo and musical key for Billboard’s number 1 charting songs for the past 8 decades. This involved copying the table on the website for each decade and pasting that data onto an excel spreadsheet. From there we were able to create a column for song name, release year, and tempo. Once this information was organized we utilized a simple averaging function on excel to get the averages of each decade and use the resulting data in our processing sketch.
Obtaining musical key information was slightly trickier, particularily because it was not available as a column within the same decades table on the website as the tempo data had been. We had to specifically look at each songs individual web page within the database to acquire information on musical key. For this we used an advanced google search function to look within the directory of the website and return search results only for pages that contained both keywords: bpm and year. The web search results returned a link and a description on the webpage which included the data information we were looking to use. We then saved the search results page directly off google as a .csv file using a Firefox add-on called Outwit Hub. This time we used a countif function to count the number of times each character (musical keys are represented with letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, G) was used for each decade and were able to see by this process which key was most common.
To expand the project further we researched a theory on colour correllation to musical key and were able to find a vast amount of research conducted by Ian C. Firth on the website http://www.musicandcolour.net/ We used this research as a basis for the colouring of the animated bars within our sketch.
Creating the processing sketch was a learning experience aswell. We had to come up with a way to convert BPM data into a usable and relative value for in our sketch. To do this we had to divide 60,000 milliseconds by our beats per minute to get beats per millisecond, to use as a relative value with the millis function.We used the millis function on processing to count the time that passed since the last beat for each tempo, when the beat had passed, the animation would restart.
Group Designations:
Justin Macri
- Parsed tempo data from the BPM database tables
- Parsed musical key data from google advanced search function
- Constructed a working formula for BPM data for use as values in processing sketch
- Created interactive animation code
- Researched colour and musical key correlation theory
- Created processing classes for each individual bpm bar animation
- Wrote artist statement and concept
Arthur Furs
- Added animated background to processing sketch
- Imported .csv data into processing
- Labelled animations
Justin Macri 