¶ Time-Lapse: 24 Songs for 24 Hours · 21 August 2014 listen/tech
One of the things I've been experimenting with at work is finding music by how distinctively it appeals to particular audiences. Mostly we're interested in regional and demographic slices, but out of idle curiosity I tried running the same code against hours of the day.
That is, for each hour in the day I calculated which songs were most disproportionately played during that particular hour as opposed to in general (by US listeners). From this I was able to assemble a compressed 24-song time-lapse exaggeration of the sounds and biases of the American day.
Our caricatured day starts at dawn with a gentle, soothing Jonsí wake-up. It gets a little preachy (literally) over breakfast, but then Seinabo Sey and Shawn Mendes slowly add some restrained alertness as the coffee takes effect. Spoon and Jason Aldean and Sam Smith carry us unhurriedly through late morning and lunch.
Early afternoon is, apparently, the official time-slot for imported Australian boy-pop, as 5 Seconds of Summer and Troye Sivan sigh and swoon for a couple songs. I can't really explain what O.A.R. is doing after that, but then it's a solid block of modern (and largely not child-suitable) pop/hip-hop straight through dinner (including, amusingly, a song called "2AM" that is very definitely more popular at 2PM than 2AM).
Eventually I guess the hip-hop kids go to bed, and the indie/pop-punk kids stay up a little later to briefly rock.
Then it's nighttime, and we get increasingly meditative with Jon Hopkins, Hans Zimmer and Ludovico Einaudi for a while before resorting (and the data really do indicate this) to actual background noise for a couple solid restorative hours of REM sleep.
[My own daily listening bears no resemblance to this, at all. Nor, I suspect, does any individual's. But the thing has more internal logic than I expected it to have, actually, so there it is.]
[Or, if you'd rather, this:]
That is, for each hour in the day I calculated which songs were most disproportionately played during that particular hour as opposed to in general (by US listeners). From this I was able to assemble a compressed 24-song time-lapse exaggeration of the sounds and biases of the American day.
Our caricatured day starts at dawn with a gentle, soothing Jonsí wake-up. It gets a little preachy (literally) over breakfast, but then Seinabo Sey and Shawn Mendes slowly add some restrained alertness as the coffee takes effect. Spoon and Jason Aldean and Sam Smith carry us unhurriedly through late morning and lunch.
Early afternoon is, apparently, the official time-slot for imported Australian boy-pop, as 5 Seconds of Summer and Troye Sivan sigh and swoon for a couple songs. I can't really explain what O.A.R. is doing after that, but then it's a solid block of modern (and largely not child-suitable) pop/hip-hop straight through dinner (including, amusingly, a song called "2AM" that is very definitely more popular at 2PM than 2AM).
Eventually I guess the hip-hop kids go to bed, and the indie/pop-punk kids stay up a little later to briefly rock.
Then it's nighttime, and we get increasingly meditative with Jon Hopkins, Hans Zimmer and Ludovico Einaudi for a while before resorting (and the data really do indicate this) to actual background noise for a couple solid restorative hours of REM sleep.
[My own daily listening bears no resemblance to this, at all. Nor, I suspect, does any individual's. But the thing has more internal logic than I expected it to have, actually, so there it is.]
[Or, if you'd rather, this:]