Finally adding contextual data
I implemented the first set of contextual data for my test set of music. I’m grabbing moods off of allmusic.com. These are descriptors like “spooky”, “lively”, or “epic”, which are usually listed per album. I’m incorporating these features into the PCA by treating each descriptor as a separate feature, giving each song with the given descriptor a “1”, and all others a “0”. These contextual data are being added into the model that already has audio-based data.
As expected, this stratifies the whole data set, and is an interesting way of separating out the albums… those albums with the same sets of mood tags appear in a stripe across the space, and their position in the stripe comes from the audio features. If I had to guess what the audio feature separation means here, I’d say it’s distributing music on a spectrum of edgier, more bursty sounds (on the left in this visual representation) to smoother, softer sounds (on the right). I am guessing this purely from inspection.
Here are some examples:
- I see a stripe of this album: Backstreet Boys — “Black & Blue”. It moves from “Shining Star” (click to listen; you need Windows Media Player) on the edgy side, to “How Did I Fall In Love With You“ (click to listen IF YOU DARE; you need Windows Media Player) on the smooth side.
- I see a stripe of this album: The Beatles — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. It moves from “Getting Better” on the edgy side, to “Lovely Rita” in the middle, to “A Day In the Life” on the smooth side.
- I see a stripe of this album: 10,000 Maniacs — “Our Time in Eden”. It moves from “Candy Everyone Wants“ on the edgy side, to “How You’ve Grown“ on the smooth side.
Also, Busta Rhymes’ smoothest piece in the test set, “Hot Fudge”, is way less smooth than the Beatles’ edgiest piece.
