Albums and Algorithms

Course Description

Music is a constant, from Hip-hop to country to Gospel. We can play it on our phones, computers, and turntables. You have access to music from the 1700s, 1920s and 2020s. In this class we will explore lyrics, beats, music history, and the health and wealth of artists and the music industry using tools from statistics and data analysis. This course helps students explore and consider potential explanations for different phenomena they might observe while learning about music, such as how Hip-hop record sales have changed throughout the last 25 years. The purpose of this course is to: (a) show how statistics and data analysis are inherently creative and visual, (b) expose students to how statistics and data function in their everyday lives, (c) explore how research questions are formed, and (d) explain how data are collected/managed, analyzed, and presented visually and in written form. By exploring changes in lyrics over time we can describe how rap's language has evolved, or looking at artists' royalties from various media we can better understand the chances of a new artist being able to survive. This course will provide a basic overview of quantitative measurement and associated quantitative concepts and will explore the ways in which certain data analytic techniques and associated quantitative models could be used to explore problems in the music industry. Finally, and most importantly, this course will help students to become more fluent in their understanding of and communication about data by moving away from data and statistics as content that is highly theoretical and move towards a content that has real-world application.

Code

EDUC 0865

Credits

4

Subject

EDUC