Musical Data: A Christmas Number One

[MikeMoss]

So, after our last meeting we decided to work on a group project - something we can all pitch in the occasional 10 minutes on and then talk about in our meetups, but also a way to show off that the Midlands is clearly where all the creativity is!

The theme we chose is:

Can we write a song using Alteryx?

The idea would be for Alteryx to somehow aim for a Christmas song - but I think we can keep it broad in scope at the moment because we don't know how well things will work; we might end up having it analyse songs to detect the secret recipes for a Christmas hit or trying to get it to actually write something.

I think the first things we'll need are:

• A suggested source of data for lyrics
• Data source for songs - could be some meta-data, chart positions, etc.
• Data source for the actual music - notes, chords, whatever we can get

Once we've got those in place we can throw around ideas as to what we can make of it. Stick in any responses below!

[jlambert]

Here's the link I mentioned about the million song Dataset:

http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/

Will need some work to get it into Alteryx (or even to understand the structure tbh), but should be a good source.

Cheers, Jason

[MikeMoss]

Did you find any way to query what songs they had available Jason?

I was looking at this as well, it transcribes music and if I can get them to give me a free trial of the premium service I can export it in XML format, which we could probably break apart in an Alteryx workflow.

Can anyone think of a good way to get lyrics? We could try webscraping somewhere like AZ Lyrics, but we'd need some input fields (list of Xmas songs).

On a wider note for everyone (and I know there's people reading this!); when we come to process this data, it'll need weighting somehow I think, so how would we rank songs by their Christmas-y-ness? I thought we could try:

• Sales of a single within a certain timeframe around Christmas? (Would need sales data from somewhere)
• Number of inclusions on Christmas compilation albums? (The spotify API could cover that I think?)

[jlambert]

Looks like Chris has made a start on the lyrics element...

https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/top-100-songs-all-time-lyrics